Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.
I think fiction recues history from its confusions.
America can be saved only by what it’s trying to destroy.
Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.
I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child’s mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.
I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people’s sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.
I’m a novelist, period. An American novelist.
To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards.
There are no amateurs in the world of children.
Being called a ‘bad citizen’ is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That’s exactly what we ought to do.
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot...
It’s healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line.
I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.
It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
All human existence is a trick of light.
Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.