One should never underestimate the power of books.
I’ve written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.
Brooklyn has a bit of everything – some of the most beautiful things in America, and some of the most wretched, ugly, impoverished things.
It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don’t know half as much as I think I do.
Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.
No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.
If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.
The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can’t describe how deeply I love them all.
I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I’ve ever existed at all.
It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle.
I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We’ve kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don’t need. I’m anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of black Levis and that’s it.
In Invisible there’s a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister.
The most challenging project I’ve ever done, I think, is every single thing I’ve ever tried to do. It’s never easy.
All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.
We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
I don’t like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn’t work.
Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.