The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.
The Agency was the one subject in his life that could never be exhausted. Central Intelligence. Beryl saw it as the best organized church in the Christian world, a mission to collect and store everything that everyone has ever said and then reduce it to a microdot and call it God.
As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.
No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.
I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.
Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.
I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.
We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.
There’s always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
I never wanted to change the world.
Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.
And what’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.