In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.
I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
That’s why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.
When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.
Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.
Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.
People will not die. Isn’t this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They’re dying in their present form. They’re just about dead as distinct units.
Pain is just another form of information.
California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
Everything’s a scandal. Dying’s a scandal. But we all do it.
I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.
Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
I don’t consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.
We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.
I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.
It’s impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.
I’ve always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that’s where I belong, that’s where my work belongs.
You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.