I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be.

[George Saunders] is very precise about what he is doing. There isn't a thing left to chance.

It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.