Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history – the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.
A novel determines its own size and shape and I’ve never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.
Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
She became confused when she stepped onto an escalator that wasn’t working.
Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren’t noticed in the way that a writer might notice.
To be a tourist is to escape accountability.
We need time to lose interest in things.
How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?
Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?
I think my work is influenced by the fact that we’re living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.
Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror.
People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
Let’s enjoy the aimless days while we still can.
When I work I have a sculptor’s sense of the shape of the words I’m making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.
Off-camera lives are unverifiable.
Technology and violence are interdependent.