One of my most central beliefs about literature is that literature is a way of looking. It doesn’t have to do with extraordinary or unusual events. It has to do with a particular attitude taken toward the world.

Everyone’s experience of a city is different. It’s not a singular experience that everyone is going to share.

With every project, I want it to be something fun to do, but also very difficult. The more books I write, the more interested I am in the process. The sense of exhilaration as I write.

It wasn’t until later on in college that I wanted to be a writer. I was never around other writers so I didn’t know that’s what a human like me could be.

Each project needs to, in some ways, obliterate the previous project, so I've been waiting for the firepower to arrive.

Television has been elevated to an art form. You can watch 12 straight episodes of Westworld and feel like you’ve done something important. However, reality TV still functions as this lowbrow piece of culture.

I always need to be writing because just living — and this is probably a fault of mine — living in the moment is not my forte. Sometimes when I am just alive, I forget to live in the moment. I feel like there is nothing is tethering me to the planet. Yet, when I write it makes me feel like — I guess it makes me feel less depressed. It makes me feel like, okay, I can do this. It makes sense why I am here. 

Memoirs are bullshit to some degree. I don’t mean memoirists are liars; some might be, most are not. I know memoirists try to be scrupulous and try not to deviate from what they remember. It’s the last few words of my sentence where the bullshit comes in. Of course what you remember is a lie or a distortion.

If you actually met them you’ll know they spend eight years doing nothing, two months outlining, then they sell a partial, and then they go to the MacDowell Colony and write the book in three weeks. That’s what everybody does.