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.

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

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

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.

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.

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.