I can't listen to music while writing - any such distraction would have dreadful consequences.

The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour.

The simplest explanation is most often the correct one.

I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.

There are some writers I think who love to go around and visit bookstores and just interact.

Writing on your own is, in a way, a very lonely profession. There's no one there to help you.

Admiral Spartan thinks that the object must be exposed and penetrated with all possible speed.

I love 'Maxim, ' actually. It's very cool.

There's only two kinds of music I don't like... Country and Western.

The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.

Of course, Bronx is also useful as a kind of living personality test. If Bronx likes you, it's a [darn] good sign.

I don't watch TV but occasionally I'll read the Washington Post. I will say that sports are the only "real thing" on television.

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

Every artist's problem today is: What will we do with the human?

I was kind of a misfit, and when my mother died, I had to become an adult, something that I never thought I would ever be.

There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes.

I think there's a stigma to some degree about the outer boroughs and Jersey, and whether their stories are worth telling.