Nothing is a matter of age. It's really in the person because you can publish book after book after book and still want that golden apple. And maybe it's the reality principle that has hit me. I believe that a career is very different from writing. My career is a certain kind of career.

I think it's very hard to reconcile oneself to the notion that it may not matter what you think if you still want to write.

I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

It's true you have to screen out a lot living in the city. I stayed away from New York for a long time after college, and when I was first back, I'd read The Village Voice and feel like I was having a panic attack.

I subject my sentences and the words to a kind of Grand Inquisition.