I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again... The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.

I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.