I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

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.

Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give.

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

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.