On writing:

“I have so little control over the act of writing that it’s all I can do to remain conscious. Actual formal considerations are almost beyond my capacity.”

“Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn’t write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately you are always bad before you can get a little better.”

“I would love to sound like someone else at this point. There are days when I can’t bear the thought…it’s like watching a glass fall from a shelf and before it even crashes you realize, Oh shit, I’m having this thought, this paragraph, this sentence, and I know that it’s going to be parenthetical and digressive and there’ll be a movie reference… You can’t help it. That’s who you are.”

“I find writing extraordinarily difficult and not very pleasurable, though I find having done it very pleasurable.”

On Mary Tyler Moore:

“She was nice. And you can tell when someone is a bitch covering it up and when they’re actually not a bitch. She’s not a bitch. She’s totally cool! It was a thrill.”

Read the interview here.

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