Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other.

For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to.

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 paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.