I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies.

You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.

Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth.

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

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.