I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough, but Elvis just had it. It was almost spiritual. A kind of grace.

In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn't mind saying so.

I love a good play, but they're too hard to find.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

Things always change, and New York teaches you that.

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.

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.