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If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.

I think people who live in New York don't realize just how much time they spend talking about the subway.

I don't like to travel. Yet all my books seem to involve a journey.

If you look at what happened with Underground Railroad, there is so much action. There is so much intrigue; there is so much of historical importance.

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

The beauty of reading is that it lets you travel in a way you could never know.

For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.

People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.