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“Nobody asked you to write.” Over time, I realized it was a magic key.

Love is not something you wait for passively, but a practice.

The Great Gatsby had an awful, detrimental effect on me.

One of my stories was rejected by a journal as “theatrical and self-limiting.”

I’ve read this novel at various stages of my life and I feel as if I know Isabel.

In real life, my favorite character, so to speak, is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Art doesn’t conform to a capitalist’s ratio of productivity to time.

My grandmother read one of my early stories and warned—don’t force your muse.

I don’t own a smartphone and never will. I’ve never sent a text.

I’m a big fan of then. A novel needs a lot of thens.

I love talking to girls. That’s why I’ve written so much about them.

The ideal way of presenting character is to invite perception.

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.

I sometimes have to laugh because even now, as a middle-aged man.

Perhaps more than ever writers may have two kinds of fame.

I found it impossible not to imagine a radiant future for myself.

Poets need to be
in constant touch with the extremes of feeling.

That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process.

When he died earlier this year an enormous hole was left in my life.

The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.

American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition.

Grandfather advised me: learn a trade. I learned to sit at a desk.

There’s this cool magazine online. They let people read it for free.

The Interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never...

The Warsaw Pact invaded in 1968 and soon banned Hrabal’s work.

Our culture cherishes a fantasy of a certain writerly existence.

I was bold, even reckless, in what I wrote, and in how I wrote it.