It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

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

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

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.

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

Nowadays, I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.