I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically – and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I’ve dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.
You don’t want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.
It’s difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.
I’m bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I’m better than them.
The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.
There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it’s worth putting up a fight.
Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
If you have information you’ve got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.
It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories – I think it’s evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.
The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.
In some way there is no real life. It’s always the story of your life that you’re living.
