Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's — the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to… - Jonathan Lethem

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

How strange it began to seem that cars have bodies that never are supposed to touch, a disaster if they do.

Just handling this ocean of different books — new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten — it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it’s just very liberating to break out of a great man’s theory of history.

I guess I’ve always liked working from that sense of — what would you call it? — license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby.