I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.

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

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

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.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

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.

Good films demand to be looked at several times in order to be observed completely.