When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender - was made at some point in somebody's day.

The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative.

I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

If you write every day, you're going to write a lot of things that aren't terribly good, but you're going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.