Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment.
A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn't already know.
I'd been coming to New York for weekends since I was 17, and after 9/11, I started making these trips more frequently, just to make contact with the city.
I fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years.
Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the book - you know, anyone not vivid enough to have a claim on my attention.
I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household.
I have this weird tropism for islands. Take me to an island as far from New York as I can possibly go.
I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural.
One of the ways I stuck out was I was a very passionate reader. There was probably a cyclical nature to that; the more I felt like an outcast, the more I sought refuge in books, and the more I sought refuge in books, the more it made me not speak the same language as my peers.
At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik.
I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teenage poet.'
It may be that Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf were sitting around fretting about their Amazon reviews or their pre-pub whatever, but I kind of doubt it. I don't think that's how the work probably got made.
Narnia, Middle-earth and New York were my three fantasy universes when I was a kid.
I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth.
If I could do what Hilary Mantel does, I would probably do that. She is more intelligent and a better researcher and knows more what she's about than I do.
I'm trying to focus on my job as I see it, which is to write the next thing and to remain, to the degree that I ever was, a noticer.
I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling.
I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world.
Reading was not just an escape or a Band-Aid; it was a deep form of feeling seen and recognized, and being able to see and recognize other kindred spirits. My dad was a writer, too, which also likely had something to do with that.
I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer.
