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.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.

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 guess I've always written more from the opposite perspective, that kind of existentialist perspective which argues that existence precedes essence. And there really isn't anything essential in there - you're the product of your actions, which can always change. And they retrospectively make you one way or another.

When the male organ of a man stands erect, two thirds of his intelect go away. And one third of his religion.