The problem with an autobiography is that all these extra factors make it difficult. You don't want to hurt people's feelings. You don't know how much you can trust your memory. You don't want it to be self-serving. And you have all these issues about how to present yourself. All these factors make it harder to do than a novel.

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.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

Nothing lasts in New York. Everything's always changing in really obvious ways.

we still have the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but it just seems like part of the nature of New York, that it's always shifting.

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.

I shake my head and the tiny acrobats fall like spangles, like the cool rain on another planet, down to the inside of my feet.