Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.

It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not; if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.

Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.

Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.