I've been to Manchester enough to know it's a real place. It's not Factory Records and the Smiths bicycling around. I get it. It's a modern city.
I have a very unsatisfactory and incomplete knowledge of Brooklyn and cannot discuss specifically either what you can do here or what possibilities the city shows in an artistic way. I am not a foreigner but coming here as I do after a long stay abroad, I think things here strike me much as they strike a foreigner.
I've always seen places as being very deeply connected to the experience that people have in those places. I think that probably comes through very much in my books.
I never really thought of my neighborhood in South Philly as being a neighborhood; it was more a state of mind. For people who aren't familiar with those kinds of places, it's a whole different thing. Like, 42nd Street in New York City is a state of mind.
The first time I went to Wales I thought I'd landed in a land of hobbits. Everybody was really small and the houses were small and the writing was backwards.
I live in New York, and I love New York as well, but I think Los Angeles is a place where if you have the right person with you, there are all these little worlds that you would never guess by just looking at the exterior of what the city is.
The midwest is great because it hasn't been entirely claimed. There's more room to write about it; it's harder to write about New York, because even if you've never been there, you think you know what it's like. To do it in any sort of fresh way is trickier.
There's so much I love about home, but then there's a lot that I can acknowledge that I dislike about home. And acknowledging that to myself helps me see that place more clearly and to bring readers to that place.
It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
You always see a better side of where you're visiting when a local shows you around.
North Hollywood isn't actually Hollywood, it's in the San Fernando Valley... it's not the most glamorous part of L.A.
I've been to Nepal, but I'd like to go to Tibet. It must be a wonderful place to go. I don't think there's anything there, but it would be a nice place to visit.
I always figured Metropolis was north of New York, actually. Between New York and Boston, in my mind.
I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.
There are those airports which make you feel better, and there are those airports that, when you go there, your heart sinks: you can't wait to get out of there. They both function as airports, but it's the things that you can't measure that make them different.
