The ways in which things are superficially similar but also distinct is interesting to me.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

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.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

Literature should not be exclusive, it should be inclusive. My general view is that you can't, based on your own experience, project what a book will do for someone else. That's why I don't review books.