There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee.

I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.

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.

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

A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see.

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.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.