The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's less money and fewer people involved. You just let a book of poems trickle out in the world, and it finds its own people. Novels are much harder, and you don't think you should have to do some of the things you're made to do.

New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and bring it back clean. It enables you. Writers always feel guilty when they're doing anything but writing, and New York allows you to really write all the time if you want to - though my kids put a limit on it.