I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.

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.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.