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.

There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.

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

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

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.

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.