Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can’t have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

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

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.

Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

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.