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.

I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

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...

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.