"I do a very reverential Billie Holiday imitation that's a complete room-emptier."

I wrote the memoir, and there are certain people I still expect to jump out of the bushes and kill me. This way, no one’s going to hold me accountable for anything.

A pulp novelist goes literary.

"I once spent an hour in an airport watching someone read a book of mine—watching him turn the pages and chew his lips."

Having wanted to be a scientist, I came to literature a little late.

To the litany of ever-younger literary phenoms you can now add Upper East Sider Amanda Marquit.

I’m sort of on a Murakami kick. I was thinking it would be great to set him up in a Ford Explorer and have him tour the highways and byways of America

That we're here in Chelsea, and we've all been waiting for an hour to meet a guy in a black cowboy hat, smoking a cigar, says something tremendous about America.

Pete Hamill is a hard-boiled tabloidist turned sentimental novelist-historian; Tama Janowitz, who hung with Warhol and skewered the eighties art scene in Slaves of New York.

All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey.