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" I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing 'Kavalier & Clay,' I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.' "

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" Ideas are the easy part. I spend a lot of time batting them away, trying to keep them from distracting me from what I actually have to focus on and finish. A lot of times, they are a siren temptress beckoning me with the promise of a much shorter, simpler, more slender novel over the horizon, but of course that's very dangerous. "

" I'm a big fan of Tarantino's work, and I think I'm fascinated by his evident sense of entitlement to use black characters and black material that he feels not simply comfortable with, but that it's his right and privilege - the apparent ease with which he handles black characters, fully aware that he's been criticized for that, too. "

" Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly. "

" I have a deadline. I'm glad. I think that will help me get it done. "

" That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution. "

" It is unusual for Joe to be that way, but that's what interested me. "

" It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late. "

" He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I'd been working really hard trying to come up with something. "

" I work at night, starting at around 10 o'clock and working until 2 or 3 in the morning. I do that usually five days a week. In Berkeley, I have an office behind our house that I share with my wife, who works more in the daytime. "

" God, I just love 'A Journey to the End of the Millennium,' by A. B. Yehoshua. My favorite novel by an American Jew is probably 'Humboldt's Gift.' "

" As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place. "

" Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in. "

" I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel. "

" It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections. "

" Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story. "

" I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it. "

" It's good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn't know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So far it's been doing pretty well. "

" When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write. "

" So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong. "

" I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community built during the sixties. During the early years, it was very integrated. I grew up being taught by black teachers with black principals and vice principals and, you know, a lot of black friends. We played in mixed groups, and I kind of thought that was how it was. "

" Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That's how I feel about it. "

" Nothing ever comes out the way I hope it will. That first vision, that initial vision you have of a book, what it's going to be like when it's done, it begins to go wrong the second you start to write. "

" I was thinking, too, of Superman and his fortress of solitude. "

" I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning. "

" I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there. "

" I am a huge, raving fan of writer Matt Fraction. His semi-indie 'Casanova' series is an ongoing masterpiece of 21st-century American comics - and his run on 'Immortal Iron Fist' with Ed Brubaker was pure, yummy martial-arts-fantasy deliciousness. "

" That was all very nice of them. They didn't have to do anything because I wasn't officially involved at all. "

" The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire. "

" People keep saying, 'Oh, you're getting all these great reviews, that must make you really happy.' I guess it does, but mostly it's just a relief. "

" I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear. "