As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about.

Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city... But there is one thing about it. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.

I think persistence in the face of adversity is an essential part of a writer’s job description. If you don’t care enough about it to avoid being easily disheartened that way, you really should be doing something else.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.