You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

There is a saying that, according to what a person's mentality is, even an angel may seem to him to have a devil's face.

Politics is but the common pulsebeat of which revolution is the feverspasm.

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.

There is nothing so entirely desirable in all the world as a few hours oblivion.

A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.

My obligation is to release the music the way Frank [Zappa] released it.

[I]t would be unjust to our people and dangerous to our institutions to apply any portion of revenues of the nation or of the States to the support of sectarian schools.

Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.

My favorite splurge would be gluten-free pizza. Or I'm a total truffle addict so truffle mac and cheese.

When you lose a couple of times, it makes you realize how difficult it is to win.