I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.

In the summer of 1956, my mother was pregnant with me, which caused my father to confess his fear that I was going to be too much of a burden for him because he had a history of depression.

Gerald Jonas's book about stuttering is called 'The Disorder of Many Theories.' Back theory seems to suffer from the same 'Rashomon' effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.

I used to feel that everything I know I learned through my lifelong struggle with stuttering; I now feel this way about my damn back.

Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.

I couldn't tell a story if my life depended on it. I'm the world's worst joke-teller.

I think there are people who are born storytellers. I think of someone like T. C. Boyle or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I think really, without putting any pejorative on it, they're like carnival barkers, 'Come into the tent, and I'll tell you this story.'

I want the reader to join me on an intellectual and emotional journey into some major aspect of existence.

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

I believe in copyright, within limited precincts. But I also believe in fair use, public domain, and especially transformation.

We're all Vanilla Ice. Look at Girl Talk and Danger Mouse. Look at William Burroughs, whose cut-up books antedate hip hop sampling by decades. Shakespeare remixed passages of Holinshed's 'Chronicles' in 'Henry VI.' Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' embeds the French national anthem.

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.

I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.

I'm not super-polite or civil - I try to be civil, but I'm not into Seattle's niceties, and I'm not hugely wired into Seattle's natural beauty.

Seattle has shaped me in a lot of ways.

When you're in New York City or Boston or something, you feel surrounded by cities and by culture.

The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.

I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

We've been appropriating in art since Duchamp, and we've been appropriating in music since the first person was banging on drums.

Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.