In many senses, creativity and 'plagiarism' are nearly indivisible.

We judge athletes as if we all don't have trouble performing our various duties from time to time.

I'm obviously aware that most people don't agree with me, that people like to escape into a coherent world that is apart from their own.

I suspect the real reason the N.F.L. and N.B.A. don't want high schoolers and college underclassmen to play with their ball is that they don't want to jeopardize their relationship with National Collegiate Athletic Association, which serves as a sort of free minor league and unpaid promotional department for the pros.

The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.

In music, they're not endlessly rewriting Beethoven's 'Third Symphony;' in visual art, they aren't painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.

We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.

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

The essential gesture of the contemporary novel is to get people to turn the page, to entertain them, and I hate that. I want a novel where the gesture is towards existential investigation on every page. That, to me, is thrilling.

Swimming is by far the best tonic I've found for my back. I'm not a good swimmer - I do the breaststroke or elementary backstroke in the slow lane - but when I took a two-week break from swimming I was surprised how much I missed it.

The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.

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

I argued strongly to the American publisher that 'Reality Hunger' should come out first. They thought that 'The Thing About Life' would have more appeal because it's on a broader topic; it's about mortality rather than art.

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.

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

I am truly bored with 99 per cent of conventional novels. I do think it's a somewhat desiccated form.

I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.

I've always liked this idea that writing should comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable to create trouble. The value of a work of art can be measured by the harm spoken of it. If you're not feeling that, then absolutely, why bother?

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

My particular demigod is the Sonics point guard Gary Payton, who is one of the most notorious trash-talkers in the National Basketball Association. He's not really bad. He's only pretend bad - I know that - but he allows me to fantasize about being bad.

The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network.

Collage is not a kitchen sink; it's not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.

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

I don't know what's the matter with me, why I'm so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor.