Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.

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?

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.

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.

A creative mind is a spark of divinity.

Getting married early is like wrestling with calculus on a merry trip to Las Vegas!

There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.

When it comes to serious cuts to major programs like Medicaid, the American people are not calling for leadership but magic. They want cuts with no pain.

I like to run on the beach. It's a different exercise as well when you're in sand, a different kind of training.

There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.

Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices; whoever saw old age, that did not applaud the past, and condemn the present times?

In all my years one thing has never changed; You win with serious, tough-minded players. That never changes

I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.

'Keep England White' is a good slogan.