To Feel Estranged From Language Is To

Brooklyn Has A Bit Of Everything - Some Of The Most Beautiful Things In America, And Some Of The Most Wretched, Ugly, Impoverished Things.

What If I Had Been Born During A War And I Lived In An Occupied City, And People Were Being Taken Out And Shot Every Day? Everything Would Be Different - Even After The War Ended, My Future Would Be Very Different. Look At What These Poor People In Aleppo Are Going Through. The Children, The Ones Who Survive, Are Going To Be Absolutely Altered By What They Live Through, And You And I, Luckily, Have Never Had To Deal With That.

Generally, I Don't Want To Do Things. I Feel Lazy And Unmotivated. It's Only When An Idea Grabs Hold Of Me And I Can't Get Rid Of It, When I Try Not To Think About It And Yet It's Ambushing Me All The Time. I'm Thrown Up Against A Wall. The Idea Is Saying To Me, "you Have To Pay Attention To Me Because I Am Going To Be The Future Of Your Life For The Next Year Or Two Or Five." Then I Submit. I Get Into It. It's Something That Becomes So Necessary To Me That I Can't Live Without Doing That Project.

[lev] Tolstoy Is Not A Boy-writer. He's A Grown-up. And [fedor] Doestoeivski Is Not A Boy-writer.

I See Myself As Anybody, As Everybody; I'm Not Just Telling The Story Of My Life To Give The Reader A Picture Of Who I Am.