Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.
Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.
Perhaps we’ve invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.
A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.
I slept for four years. I didn’t study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
Hardship makes the world obscure.
I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he’ll become.
Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.
Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I’d feel terrible if I didn’t tell you what I was thinking, especially at a time like this.
Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.
There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can’t experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.
Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be.
I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.
My attitudes aren’t directed toward characters at all. I don’t feel sympathetic toward some characters, unsympathetic toward others. I don’t love some characters, feel contempt for others. They have attitudes; I don’t.
It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.
I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
I think literature has lost it’s power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.
I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.