I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.
The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.
In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.
Digital clocks took the ‘space’ out of time.
I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.
One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.
It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.
It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.
You become a serious novelist by living long enough.
Words are not necessary to one’s experience of the true life.
You gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.
War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.
Some people fake their death, I’m faking my life.
It’s no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.
For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.
All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.
He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.
I would never write in response to what I believe the public wanted or needed.
The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.