I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

Something in me was changed by Lincoln in the Bardo, and the great sublime/grotesque risk of [George Saunders'] ghosts was a part of it.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.

When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.