I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.
We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?
I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.
The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.
If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.
It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.
I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.
Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.
Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.
I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you were never going to set foot in Ireland again.
