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" The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality. "

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" I'm really interested in the new nonfiction. I think the hyper-digital culture has changed our brains in ways we cannot begin to fathom. "

" Take Jonathan Franzen's work: it's just old wine in new bottles. They say he's the Tolstoy of the digital age, but there can only be a Tolstoy of the Tolstoyan age. "

" I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write. "

" Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and frighteningly beautiful. "

" I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive. "

" I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty. "

" The real impulse of most books is to tell a story to keep the reader lashed to the page. I don't get why that's a proper use of an adult's time. "

" All good books wind up, I think, with the writer getting his teeth bashed in. "

" The N.C.A.A. is a multibillion-dollar business built on the talents of players who are often unqualified for or uninterested in being students and who benefit materially from the system only if they are among the few who turn professional. "

" I do not think it feasible to examine the phenomenon of hatefulness without being hateful. "

" The difference between kitties and humans is that we are aware of our mortal condition, and the burden of consciousness is to evoke and embody and explore the coordinates of our condition. "

" Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever. "

" We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense. "

" The movie - any sports movie - becomes a praise song to life here on earth, to physical existence itself, beyond striving, beyond economic necessity. "

" Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt. "

" I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence. "

" The ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for our animal impulses. "

" I'm just a totally selfish worker bee creating my little mini projects. "

" Art, like science, progresses, and to me it's bizarre that a lot of acclaimed and popular and respectable books are not advancing the art form. "

" Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly. "

" I really love that idea of the essay as an investigation. That's all anyone's life is. "

" In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression. "

" I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense. "

" What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011. "

" When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture. "

" Denied dancing and musical instruments, slaves expressed a hidden tradition of musicality and poetics by tongue and signal. "

" New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and - possessing a vision unhumbled by technology - use them to disassemble/recreate the Web. "

" I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world. "

" It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's. "

" Flipping through the channels late at night, I'll come across 'The Longest Yard' and not be able to get up off the couch until Burt Reynolds has scored the winning touchdown. "