A novel is not a rant.

Publishing is not my world.

Proust is a huge author for me.

We're all performing for someone.

I spent ten years riding motorcycles.

The art world is filled with vibrancy.

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

I don't really see art as structured by logic.

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers.

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

At a certain age just being around particular people is an event.

A historical event represents the best and the worst of that moment.

I grew up in Oregon, and then I lived in San Francisco and New York.

I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.

I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.

There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

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

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

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

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

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

I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.

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

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

My neighbors think I do nothing because I don't go to a job, which is fine and good.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women's areas of preoccupation or male ones.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

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

When the art world is done wrong, a reader's faith is lost and possibly not recuperable.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

The 1970s seemed particularly playful. People were trying to make work that couldn't be sold.

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topic.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

Share This Page