Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.

I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of, instead of hiding the structure and making it look organic and natural, we're going to put the structure on the outside. But most of the time, at least for me, all I could attend to [in Swing Time] was that act of structural self-consciousness.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.

Asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.