The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.

I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.

When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it's no one's business that you've shrunk your parents and keep them in a terranium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that's a diary you're producing from your cleavage, I'm leaving.

Yo! You’re my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I’d have asked for it, Motherfucker!

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

I've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.