Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I don't like having a teaching job -- office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that -- but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.

I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.

We wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.

Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else -- it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.

I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically -- and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I've dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.

I don't make notes for myself because I either lose them or they make no sense to me at all. I once found a piece of paper with the note: 'everything.' Apparently I made a note to myself not to forget everything!

The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth -- reality is the fastest American commodity.

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.

I long for, not a writer's retreat -- I can write in any situation -- but a reader's retreat.

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I do believe -- and I know I shouldn't -- that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.

I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.

My books have been published all over Europe. They read me there, and I want to read them back. I also spend a lot of time in Europe, often meeting writers, and I'm sick of apologizing for the embarrassing shortage of translations in America.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.