Cities - I'm attracted to them, and I have a special attachment to New York...it's my place.

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail.

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

Then, without any warning, we both straightened up, turned towards each other, and began to kiss. After that, it is difficult for me to speak of what happened. Such things have little to do with words, so little, in fact, that it seems almost pointless to try to express them. If anything, I would say that we were falling into each other, that we were falling so fast and so far that nothing could catch us.

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously.

No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.