I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at is son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, not even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.

The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan.

In my life, I've lived in very different kinds of places - very tiny rooms when I was young. And you do learn to cope with it. The funny thing is, as you begin to inhabit larger places, it's very interesting how quickly you adapt to your space. What seems enormous at first becomes natural after a few weeks.

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