I'd go nuts. Because people look at the same passage and one person will say this is the best thing he's ever read, and another person will say it's ….

When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any mo….

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive..

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance..

Things have not changed as much as we would like to think they have. Or maybe we're just in another one of the divided moments in the country. The la….

I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly t….

Memory and the imagination are almost identical. It's the same place in the brain and the same thing is happening. When you think about your own life….

Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination,….

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resis….

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to….

If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything..

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence..

I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now,….

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it..

The things we remember are often things that have great emotional importance, and so they have a lasting effect..

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I h….

I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that lang….

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are t….

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it.

I have difficulty orienting myself in space, and I'm probably one of the few people who gets lost in Manhattan..

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. I confess I don't even have a computer, I don't have a cell phone..