I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.

I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.

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

Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.