The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet.

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.

We're being subject to incredible amounts of surveillance, the police are taking on draconian powers and violating our rights. I think this attempt to protect ourselves is ultimately going to founder because people don't like living inside prisons.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.

NYC doesn't have a big sign saying "You must love diversity and the rights of all people." And that's not what makes you love diversity in NYC or anywhere. What makes you love diversity is because you live in it and you experience it.