I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.

There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my remory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.

New York is the last true city.