What do you do when you're no longer the hero of your own story?

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.

That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.

Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.

A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if hes any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.

It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.