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.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

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.

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.

Things always change, and New York teaches you that.

I'm someone who's really susceptible to tears.