I take for granted that for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality, just as actors need to act all the time to make up for some deficiency in their sense of themselves.
During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence.
Enlightened legislation or enlightened social activity of whatever kind, does play into the hands of people with agendas of their own. If you legalize euthanasia, you provide a field day for people who like killing other people.
I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.
People think that by living on some mountainside in a tent and being frozen to death by freezing rain, they’re somehow discovering reality, but of course that’s just another fiction dreamed up by a TV producer.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I’m intensely interested in change – probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
In his mind Vaughan saw the whole world dying in a simultaneous automobile disaster, millions of vehicles hurled together in a terminal congress of spurting loins and engine coolant.
Nonetheless, Scranton had travelled in space. He had known the loneliness of separation from all other human beings, he had gazed at the empty perspectives that I myself had seen.
By the eighteenth book, one has a sense of having bricked oneself into a niche, a roosting place for other people’s pigeons. I wouldn’t recommend it.
If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.
I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you.
There is a British pop group called God. At a recent book signing the lead singer introduced himself and gave me a cassette. I have heard the voice of God.
I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.
Across the communication landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.
Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don’t you realize that those two species are extinct now?
Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.
The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it’s shroud.
In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.