You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.

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.

I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.

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

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

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