When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.
Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.
Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.
I’ve never made an outline for any novel that I’ve written. Never.
Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore.
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.
Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.
The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.
People say great art is immortal. I say there’s something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.
What terrorists gain, novelists lose.
People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night.
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.
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.