We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
We can’t do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.
Have you ever seen so many people,” she whispered, “gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together?
Every lost moment is the life. It’s unknowable, except to us, each of us inexpressibly...
He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry.
Don’t we know when a death is passing in the air?
In time I let my head ease back on the top step and I closed my eyes. I was moving into the biblical phase of the afternoon, the peak of my new simplicity. A verity less than eternal had little appeal. I prepared myself to think of night, desert, sorrowful forests, of the moon, the stars, the west wind, baptismal mist and the rich myrrh of harvested earth. Instead I thought of tits.
A Catholic gets it early. Incense, organ music, ashes on the forehead, wafer on the tongue. The best things shimmer with fear.
We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.
There were times when he felt the lure of a submoronic mode of being.
This country is toilet-oriented.
I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.
We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we’ve forgotten that darkness means death.
The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it’s the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down.
I moonlight, except there’s nothing I’m moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that’s out there.
Once you live in the street, there’s nothing but the street.
She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. we are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said.
Only shallow people insist on disbelief. You and I know better. We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there’s no longer a moral or spatial distinction between thinking and acting.
The question is can you cure the disease before it kills you? Once you set out consciously to cure the disease, as I did even before I knew the word cancer, you run the risk of catching it. Comprende? Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you’re a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not.
Sometimes I think everything I’ve done since those years, everything around me in fact, I don’t know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely – what – fictitious.