Something has happened where you almost never grow up in America. Maybe it's the greater wealth.
I didn't think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love - abject lonliness - is not alright.
It was one of those days when every time I went to go out the door, something grabbed me in the back of the brain and said, lie down and masturbate one more time.
Whenever I wrote fiction, people always seemed to think that what I wrote was true, that it was entirely autobiographical. And when I would write non-fiction, they often accused me of exaggeration and fictionalization.
To write about a place, you have to live there.
Unfortunately, I'm one of those idiots who knows everything about health and is in a constant state of alarm, and yet I continue to do everything I shouldn't do.
I wondered where the person was who had taken my place, who wanted to know what news people had been told. I'm always looking for the person who replaces me, who thinks the things I do, who fills in for me when I'm not there. I know there is someone younger than me doing what I did and someone older doing what I will do, and someone my age being just like me.
Some ego is involved because I guess one wants to be perceived as a good clown and one puts one's name on the art; but it's so hard to do anything in life, trapped as we are in our bodies, that is purely selfless for others... somehow the self is always involved.
For me, the past is dead. Can't go back.
Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.
Mostly I have to try to censor myself so as not to write things that will hurt other people, or that will go too far.
Don't hold me to anything in the book. I'm a waffler. I like wafflers. They said John Kerry was a waffler, but I admired him for that - showed he could change his mind.
I've really never written about my relationships, or things like that. I wouldn't want to divulge things that were too private.
I've always been inspired by Don Quixote as a role model of sorts, of the power of books to sort of make you insane in maybe a beautiful way.
After my first novel, my mother said to me, 'Why don't you make your writing more funny? You're so funny in person.' Because my first novel was rather dark. And I don't know, but something about what she said was true. 'Yes, why don't I?' Maybe I was afraid to be funny in the writing. But since then, seven books later, almost everything I've done has a comedic edge to it.
In fact, I have no hobbies. The only thing I like to do in life is to go to the Russian Baths in Manhattan. I also like to watch sports on TV, and I like to read books. So that's it - Russian Baths, sports, and books.
I don't laugh that much, but I do like humorous books, and I like to entertain readers that way.
I hid my underwear beneath a parked Peugeot.
I grew up in northern New Jersey - the banlieue of New York - and I now live in Brooklyn. I am separated from my parents by about 50 miles, but really there is almost no distance between us. I speak to them nearly every day.
My sophomore English teacher encouraged me to write for the school paper, and that's what got me started. Suddenly it struck me that being a writer could be a romantic and adventurous position. Previously, I had thought I would be a tennis pro, giving lessons at a local club. I thought that would be a good life, and it might have been.
I don't like to publicly acknowledge being a Jew.
There's no shortage of material in life.
I have very few hobbies. In fact, I have no hobbies.
The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.
I promote my own self-hatred.
