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 learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

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.

Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

I guess they needed a maze in Japan, where everything's neat and tidy. In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.