I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

Worrying about outcomes over which I have no control is punishing myself before the universe has decided whether I ought to be punished.

You see yourself as if old and wise.I see you really miss your childhood.

It takes a lot of energy to be funny... for me it does. I feel like I work twice as hard when I'm doing comedy.

The [film] business is run by men, and they're basically interested in their own species, and they're not so interested in women belonging to the human race.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be

There's something beautiful about working in the one place in the world where the world is present, like United Nations. Otherwise, one would have to go to each of these countries to negotiate.

Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them.

We don't invent our missions, we detect them.

[Question: Do you feel that scientists correct themselves as often as they should?] More often than politicians, but not as often as they should.