“Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a kind of immediate gratification—the relationship of sketches to battle paintings.”

more info

“De Kooning can do ‘messy’ by making a charcoal stroke over paint and then smudging same with his talented thumb—in prose the same gesture tends to look like simple ineptitude. De Kooning has a whole vocabulary of bad behavior which enables him to set up the most fruitful kinds of contradictions. It frees him. I have trouble rendering breaking glass.”

more info

“There’s nothing more rewarding than a fresh set of problems.”

more info

“The order of pieces in a given book is mostly a matter of trying to make sure they don’t get in each other’s way. Much like hanging pictures for a show. Some pictures fight other pictures, not because either is a bad picture, but because the scale fights or the color fights.”

more info

“There’s no question but that much of what is published in this country is cotton candy and that this cluttering-up of the bookstores damages writers. To say nothing of what such a diet does to the brain’s stomach, if you’re a reader. But you can’t complain about this too much; it’s a pluralism that allows R. Crumb and Walter Benjamin and William Gaddis and Julia Child all to live in paperback heaven together.”

more info