I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.