I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

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.

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

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

what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?

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.

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.