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

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.

Green-tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century.

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

I'll tell you what I did need to learn was tolerance, and I think I've been actually given a daily opportunity to practice that, and it's - it's - and I know that that sounds almost like a backhanded slap, and it is in a way because I haven't been successful at it every day.

Let's take a timeout. Let's allow investors the opportunity in a period of market calm to re-examine what's happened and to deploy new strategies into the marketplace.

We have a responsibility to ensure that every individual has the opportunity to receive a high-quality education, from prekindergarten to elementary and secondary, to special education, to technical and higher education and beyond.

When I talk to people in need, they tell me they want to hope; they are eager for opportunity; they are ready for better days. And I can tell you that every time their hopes are disappointed, all nations lose.

I was grateful for the opportunity to make a difference. The political violence really started in 1970-1971. The political difficulties start a little bit beyond that.

The men and women of our armed forces played an instrumental role in the election process - securing polling sites and providing security - that allowed so many Iraqis the opportunity to vote freely for the first time ever.

The opportunity to create a small world between two pieces of cardboard, where time exists yet stands still, where people talk and I tell them what to say, is exciting and rewarding.

Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

I just have my own taste, and I just try and stick with that. I'm just trying to play as many characters as I can for as long as I have an opportunity to.

Education is our greatest opportunity to give an irrevocable gift to the next generation.

When I decided to get married at 40, I couldn't find a dress with the modernity or sophistication I wanted. That's when I saw the opportunity for a wedding gown business.

The promise of equal educational opportunity envisioned by the Brown decision remains unfulfilled.

If a window of opportunity appears, don't pull down the shade.