I wouldn't be a very good writer if someone hadn't taught me how to read.

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

Tweet, tweet, you're alive, you ignorant asshole.

For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better.

Something will be there when the flood recedes. We know that. It will be those people now standing in the water, and on those rooftops - many black, many poor. Homeless. Overlooked. And it will be New Orleans - though its memory may be shortened, its self-gaze and eccentricity scoured out so that what's left is a city more like other cities, less insular, less self-regarding, but possibly more self-knowing after today. A city on firmer ground.

At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.