To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.

Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.

Our biggest art forms are film and television, and there hasn't been a great film about 9/11 yet, nor has there been a great television series. Something like The Wire gives us a rich and fully achieved picture of the wasteful, cruel War on Drugs; something like The White Ribbon gives a perspective on World War I that could only have been presented long after the event itself.

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.

I'm not hopeful about America, and I'm not hopeful about the world, no. Life goes on and, for those of us who are lucky, there's a great deal to enjoy in it. But will things get better for most people? I don't know. I don't see the evidence.

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.