It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the President had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone. It's a larger anthropological shift in my mind than even the tattoo age in the United States.

I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.

Life is a sandwich of activity between two periods of bed-wetting.

That's part of fiction, creating a world better than the one you live in.

Even if you're the worst writer in the world, at least you'll have the evidence.

I don't know any more about America than one knows being trapped in it.

Cholesterol to go with alcohol; all the bad things in English-speaking life end in -ol.