The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.
Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.
Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.
Clouds are no deterrent. Clouds intensify the drama, trap and shape the light.
Certainly I’ve never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It’s a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing...
Technology is lust removed from nature.
If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.
Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.
I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America...
Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.
I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let’s not say men. Let’s say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.
The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.
Plot a murder, you’re saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
There were moments when she wasn’t talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.
In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.
To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.
A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million.
The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.