For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.

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

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

Life is fundamentally up for grabs

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.