I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French.

I grew up reading the 'Village Voice' and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the 'Voice' right after college.

I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside.

I'm of that subset of native New Yorkers who can't drive.

I don't generally follow sports. At an early age, I discovered that nature had apportioned me only a small reserve of enthusiasm. Best to ration.

I like to know how I'm supposed to feel about things. Just a little clue or hint.

If the world's nations can set aside their petty bickering over religion, politics, and territory, certainly I can 'get that Olympic Spirit' and rise above my prejudices.

I didn't know I was a zombie pedant until I started considering what from the zombie canon to keep in 'Zone One' and what to ignore.

In college, I wrote maybe three short stories.

There's not a lot of good TV.

In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it's so evocative. You think it's a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

I love getting out of the Q train at Union Square. It's such a mix of people, like a party. There's always an errand you can do along there, whether it's picking up contacts or buying poker chips.

I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before.

The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well.

I wanted to be one of these multidisciplinary critics who is doing music one day, TV the next, and books the next.

Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.

In 'John Henry Days,' I was taking my idea of junketeering and sort of blowing it up to absurd extremes.

I never actually went anywhere when I was a journalist. I was a critic, and I just sort of got stuff in the mail and chatted about it.

As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them out.

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

There's always an attack on the sophomore novel from some quarters.

'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it.

I'm always trying to switch voices and genres.

I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.

I envied kids who played soccer and football, but that was not my gig.

In the apocalypse, I think those average, mediocre folks are the ones who are going to live.

I was always into comic books and horror stories and a huge consumer of pop culture. And then I worked for awhile for 'The Village Voice'.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

If you write about race in 1850, you end up talking about race today because in many ways, so little has changed.

I like questions that tee me up to make weird jokes, frankly.

There are good writers and bad writers. It's hard to find writers who really speak to you, but the work is out there.

I enjoy thinking about how race plays out over the centuries, how technology evolves, how cities transform themselves. These subjects are present in some of my books and absent in others.

I do write about race a lot, but I don't think writers - of any shade or background or whatever - have to write about certain subjects.

People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.

A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye's spinach when I was a kid.

The movie 'Rock 'n' Roll High School' was a sacred text in my household.

If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.

The readership for 'Sag Harbor' was different from people who'd read me before - it was linear and realistic, not as strange as 'The Intuitionist.' Did they carry over to 'Zone One,' a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I'm used to people not caring about my other books.

I knew that a zombie book would not particularly appeal to some of my previous readers, but it was artistically compelling, and being able to do a short nonfiction book about poker was really fun and great.

I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.

Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it's Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker.

In the 1930s, the government paid writers to interview 80- and 90-year-old former slaves, and I read those accounts. I came away realizing - not surprisingly - that many slave masters were sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.

Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone.

I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.

Generally, I walk around in a glum mood.

Once I got to college, it seemed that the Hamptons were a little bit too posh for me and didn't represent the kind of values I was embracing in my late teens. So, I didn't go out there, except to visit my parents, for a long time. And then, after 9/11, I discovered it was a nice, mellow place to hang out.

In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it.

I'm not a representative of blackness, and I'm not a healer.

'Zone One' has one kind of an apocalypse, and 'The Underground Railroad' another. In both cases, the narrators are animated by a hope in a better place of refuge - in the last surviving human outpost, Up North. Does it exist? They can only believe.