When you're young, you don't especially think of yourself as being young. You're just alive and everything's interesting and you don't think of things in terms of age because you're not conscious of it.

Another thing that's good about writing to describe a situation or a state of consciousness is that you can finally get it right. That was my intention, and that's always interesting.

It used to be that artists thought of nature as their environment. Now media is our environment. It has been for the past 50, 70 years. It's what you see on TV, on the computer, what is in the magazines and newspapers.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

Things always change, and New York teaches you that.

I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.

I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam War and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out.