I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

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.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

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.

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.