[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.

I am very scared at the beginning of each book, because I've never written it before. I feel I have to teach myself how to do it.

Generally, I don't want to do things. I feel lazy and unmotivated. It's only when an idea grabs hold of me and I can't get rid of it, when I try not to think about it and yet it's ambushing me all the time. I'm thrown up against a wall. The idea is saying to me, "You have to pay attention to me because I am going to be the future of your life for the next year or two or five." Then I submit. I get into it. It's something that becomes so necessary to me that I can't live without doing that project.

Farts come from no one and nowhere; they are anonymous emanations that belong to the group as a whole, and even when every person in the room can point to the culprit, the only sane course of action is denial.

I hate reading digital books. I don't enjoy the experience. I like smelling the paper, turning the pages. I think the book as we've always known it is an efficient technology.

[Lev] Tolstoy is not a boy-writer. He's a grown-up. And [Fedor] Doestoeivski is not a boy-writer.

Even you, who’ve lived inside your body for 64 years, would apparently be unable to recognize your foot in an isolated photograph of that foot, not to think of your ear or one of your eyes or elbow, also familiar to you in the context of the whole, but utterly anonymous when taken piece by piece. We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.