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

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.

I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form.

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.

I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

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.