Eventually, I grew out of my interest in motorcycles because they're quite dangerous. I don't ride them anymore. But I have this history.

Art breathes into life a surplus that is both vital and extraordinary.

Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978.

I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.

I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours' sleep to work.

My dad had a Vincent Black Shadow, which was a quite particular thing: it was the fastest cycle of its era... It sparked a world for me; when I was old enough, I got a motorcycle.

In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.

I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of exclusion, which is why it's a great place to circulate when you are in the lucky position, as I am, of not wanting or needing anything from anyone.

I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from 'Mad Magazine.' But all other comic books literally gave me a headache.

I write the novels that are possible for me to write, not that ones I think will come across in a certain light.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn't even have to mention them out loud to each other.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.

I know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you.

I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.

I had always wanted to include images in a novel, and with my first book, 'Telex From Cuba,' I made an elaborate website that is basically all images.

These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. It's hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now - there's something romantic about it.

I don't write listening to music, and in a way it seems silly that any writer should have to explain why not, as it's possibly no different from saying you don't eat gourmet dinners or play tennis while you're at the keyboard.

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

I think that when the social stakes for people are higher, how you present yourself may sometimes feel like it's going to inform your destiny. Because if other people regard you in a certain way, they'll want to help you, and you will end up having a career.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.