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.

You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.

Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

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

It's impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural stuff, to human expressivity... it's a safe enclosure.