I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.

In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

It was good while it was good.

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We're all nerds, on one subject or another.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.

I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film.

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again. The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there.

What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

I cant bear the silent ringing in my skull.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction by skipping the parts that bored me.

The invisible are always so resolutely invisible, until you see them.

Artists freeze themselves into these weird postures that are meant to be impressive and involving, then they fling them out into the world like Polaroids, and then they move on. And I'm stuck in this intense relationship to the Polaroid.

Teenage life - possibly adult life too is all about what you want and can't have. And then about what you receive and misuse.

There is no executive order; there is no law that can require the American people to form a national community. This we must do as individuals and if we do it as individuals, there is no President of the United States who can veto that decision.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

We need to begin an all-out diplomatic offensive on Darfur in order to prepare the way for a peacekeeping force that can ensure protection for the people of Darfur.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all. But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident.

I think acting is about forgetting yourself in order to give the best of yourself. It's passing through you more than you're creating it. You're not the flower, but the vase which holds the flower.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself.

I am co-counsel and as co-counsel I have the right to represent myself, speak for myself and conduct myself and my trial by myself in my best interests in order of due process.

I wanted to make the violence beautiful in order to heighten our revulsion.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.