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

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

Just the fact that Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by such a large number gives some validation to the impulse to stand firm. If we don't, I think within a year administration is pretty much going to dismantle American society as we've known it. I'm not sure that we're able to stop it from happening, but I don't think people should just roll over and passively watch it happen.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

He slipped away slowly, withdrawing from this world by small, imperceptible degrees, and in the end it was as if he were a drop of water evaporating in the sun, shrinking and shrinking until at last he wasn’t there anymore.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

I don't think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.