To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

We are the species that clamors to be lied to.