I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.

He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

and now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts.

Writing is, after all, a gesture towards other people, giving something to others. And so it's not a completely hermetic exercise. It's really an opening up.

It's a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.