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" I started coming up to New York at age 17. There was a girl I met over the summer somewhere; I was chasing her. I would drive up to D.C., where I had made some friends, which was about four hours away, and we would take the bus up to New York. "

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" I find it heartening that readers are still excited about diving into a world. "

" 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. "

" When something is at risk or in danger or about to be lost, those are the moments you start to realize how much it means to you. "

" Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment. "

" I fell in love with New York at some indeterminate point in my early years. "

" We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, 'like'-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd. "

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" When I get online, there's this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least. "

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Narcissism

" Sure, 'Les Miserables' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the novel will save you some time and spare you the long part where Hugo goes on and on about the Parisian sewer system. But I would hate for the novel to lose that. "

" I have this weird tropism for islands. Take me to an island as far from New York as I can possibly go. "

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" The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?' "

" I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets. "

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" I'm not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego. "

" 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. "

" The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout. "

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" I don't quite know why, but I am long-winded. "

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I Am

" The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be. "

" I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities. "

" I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural. "

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University

Road

" A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn't already know. "

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" I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teenage poet.' "

" For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on. "

" 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. "

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" 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 associated excellence in writing with New York City. "

" I was working my first adult job, a quasi journalistic job, writing content for a website. In the offices, we had banks of TVs, papers, a constant media stream, which was unusual for 2001. "

" At 14 and 15, I was sort of my town's resident beatnik. "

" In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week. "

" 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. "