New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great citi….

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe..

The point of a notebook is to jumpstart the mind..

The world is divided up into two kinds of people - those who look at their body waste in the toilet bowl, and those who don't..

The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord..

Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field..

There are two types of people ... the scrutinizers and the scrutinized.

Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier..

The professional guts a book through - in full knowledge that what he is doing is not very good. Not to work is to exhibit a failure of nerve..

The eleventh commandment of a motion picture negotiation: Thou shalt not take less than thy last deal..

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself..

Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track..

I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge..