I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.

Any writer knows that what's left out is as essential, if not more so, than what's there. Unlearning works that way.

People are less focused on the story, and more on how the story is told.

People in the upper classes can just as easily be indifferent to their own body, or treat themselves as badly, as people who don't have the money. There are always differences among differences.

When I'm choosing things, there's a level of intelligence I want to peel off, whether it's written in terribly simple sentences, whether it's from the point of view of a dog, or a 15-year-old boy.

Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.

There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.