God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

Capitalism, in the realm of sexuality, I figure, thinks that we behave in specific ways, like a breast is always going to produce a hard-on for some product, whereas the truth is that sexuality is always a continuum, which can be characterized by reversals.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.