I think that the massive, overarching, interconnected systems of technology tend to make us a little insecure, somewhat pliable, and susceptible to half-beliefs.
There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.
In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It’s everywhere and nowhere.
It was only when I found myself writing things I didn’t realise I knew that I said, ‘I’m a writer now.’
I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.
In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.
Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.
Isn’t death the boundary we need?
The dead have a presence.
We commit our crimes at night and reveal ourselves in the high noon of studio lights.
Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That’s why it’s so shattering. It strips us of appearances.
The modern meaning of life’s end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?
There’s a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.
There’s never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.
When you try to unravel something you’ve written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
Music is dangerous in so many ways. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world.
Famous people don’t want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there’s something crawling in their clothes.