"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."

"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."

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

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

"I love comic books and always did as a kid."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Literature precedes genre."

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

"What genre it falls under is only of interest later."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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