I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

What's beautiful about art is that it circumscribes a space, a physical and mental space. If you try to put the entire world into every page, you turn out chaos.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

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

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.

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

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.