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.
What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.
In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.
I hate my life. I’m at the point where I want to hear about other people’s lives. It’s like switching from fiction to biography.
We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That’s the way we chose to live. I’m prepared to defend it.
In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.