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.
Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.
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.
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.