Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture: to reflect back its 'whatness,' refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness.

One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time.

I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.

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've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.

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

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.

The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.

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

Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.

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.

I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.

I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

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

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'

I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.

Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.

I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.

Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.

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 want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.

Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.

The only requirement of a fan or a patient is the surrender to authority.

You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?

I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.

People like Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen completely bore me.

I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.

Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating.