He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history – the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.
We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.
Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.
It’s a Cadillac all right.” “The Rolls-Royce of automobiles,” Ottum.
Billy couldn’t recall ever having seen a blind man laugh.
There is another kind of belief, a second force, insecure, untrusting, a faith that is spring-fed by the things we fear in the night.
We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
We can’t do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins.
Have you ever seen so many people,” she whispered, “gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together?
Every lost moment is the life. It’s unknowable, except to us, each of us inexpressibly...
He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry.
Don’t we know when a death is passing in the air?
In time I let my head ease back on the top step and I closed my eyes. I was moving into the biblical phase of the afternoon, the peak of my new simplicity. A verity less than eternal had little appeal. I prepared myself to think of night, desert, sorrowful forests, of the moon, the stars, the west wind, baptismal mist and the rich myrrh of harvested earth. Instead I thought of tits.
A Catholic gets it early. Incense, organ music, ashes on the forehead, wafer on the tongue. The best things shimmer with fear.
We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.
There were times when he felt the lure of a submoronic mode of being.
This country is toilet-oriented.
I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.
We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we’ve forgotten that darkness means death.
The dangerous secrets used to be held outside the government. Plots, conspiracies, secrets of revolution, secrets of the end of the social order. Now it’s the government that has a lock on the secrets that matter. All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down.
I moonlight, except there’s nothing I’m moonlighting from. Moonlight is all that’s out there.