My characters, I find them as I'm writing. It's quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.

This is very rare for anyone in life to pursue something and that thing being the thing you actually most want to do. It's all about the inner, rather than the outer. Whether people like or don't like my work, read it or don't read it, it's just been a gift from the gods that I've been able to sit at my desk for the last almost 50 years and do the things I've wanted to do.

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.