Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.

Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in fiction is dangerous. It also lacks imagination.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.