When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.

Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough.

Betty died of a broken heart. Some people laugh when they hear that phrase, but that's because they don't know anything about the world. People die of broken hearts. It happens every day, and it will go on happening to the end of time.

Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.

Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of 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.