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.

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.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

Was the crew well? Was I not? I had profited in many ways by the voyage. I had even gained flesh, and actually weighed a pound more than when I sailed from Boston.

Our situation here, without any exaggeration, is beyond description almost; it is such as eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor hath it ever entered into the heart of men to conceive Boston ever to arrive at.

A very considerable body of the German people live in America and propose to fight that Government. Bourke in his great speech last week welcoming the Belgian mission to Boston worked out the President's meaning with care.

At a Boston signing, someone from the audience asked why I was so obsessed with furniture in my books. The question rattled around in my head. I had no idea that I was obsessed with furniture.

My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.

Boston is the engine of the state's economy.

And it was from Boston that one in every six American families began their journey into the land of the free.

I don't believe a manager ever won a pennant. Casey Stengel won all those pennants with the Yankees. How many did he win with the Boston Braves and Mets?

There isn't much discussion of ruling class in America even in Boston, probably one of the most class-conscious cities in the country?

In my freshman year in high school, I went to the only public high school in Boston with a theatre program.

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College.

Probably the biggest thing that surprises people is that I am obsessed with hockey. I grew up in the Boston area so I am obsessed with hockey since I was a little kid.

When I go abroad I always sail from Boston because it is such a pleasant place to get away from.

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Here's what I see all across this great city - people working together to make Boston a better place to live and to raise children, to grow and pursue dreams.