But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.

It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

This is odd, but there are certain things that are really embarrassing to talk about - one is my job and the success that I've had in it, and the other is money.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.

The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.

Literature precedes genre.

All the stuff that I used to treat with contempt - you know, I'm an artist, man, I don't do that family stuff - has begun to seem really important.

The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.

I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.

A bed is where a sense of shared purpose first takes root.

Impotence fetishism bisexuality and bondage are all facts of life and our fiction should reflect that.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.