With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

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

I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.