You never want to have to give your child bad news of any kind.
The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.
Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all of them flattering. But the true, volatile charisma of New York lies in how balkanised it is.
New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.
Don't get me wrong: I can and do waste time on the Internet with the best of them, but in some respects, I am an embarrassingly analog guy. I am not on Facebook. I write whole books on yellow legal pads. I do not own a cell phone.
I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.
John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
Children go from being a kind of cultural protectorate to the Junior Auxiliary of the tube-watching nation at large, and programs are designed for them on the same principle as they're designed for grown-ups: as a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
I am hopelessly devoted to paper. Nothing against e-readers of any sort - anything that keeps people reading is okay by me - but I am not, historically, an early adopter of such things.
There's no path to being a writer that's applicable to everyone. Some young writers have the fortitude to work in a vacuum. For me, it was important to have some sense that my failures weren't unique.
More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.
I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.
I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.
What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?
I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture.
'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.
When I read a book I liked, I would get a pen and one of my father's legal pads and rewrite it from memory as if I had thought of it myself. It was a clear sign that I wanted to be involved in writing, even if it was just pretend at that point.
Kenneth Branagh. There was a time in my life when people would tell me constantly that I look like him. I could do a lot worse than that.
