By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.

I definitely care about how the concept of New York punk was constructed, and why it mattered. But I wasn't gonna do that. Partly because I'm not a great journalist...

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.

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

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

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.