It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

I'm happy to report that 'The New Press' is still in business to this day. But not thanks to me. I was a really bad publishing intern.

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.

One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.