Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

Listen, I've been sick ever since I started working here, but today I'm well and I won't be in anymore.

I don't want to give the impression that I hold daily conversations with my household appliances, although my toaster is as old as Drew Barrymore and almost as talented.

Sometimes one gets the feeling that life still thinks it's living in Paris in the '30s.

Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to use such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction. We employ drugs, yoga techniques and poetics - and a thousand more clumsy methods - in an effort just to bring things back up to normal.