To me there’s no difference between a book of stories and a novel – they’re just slightly different shapes.
What you demand from storytelling is a moral – even political – import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.
Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiatet the conditions of your selfhood under pereptually changing existential circumstances.
Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self.
Right now, it didn’t look good, the life. What doesn’t kill you makes you horny.
Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy.
Only gay bars were full; the heterosexual joints were empty – the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses.
Hence Joshua giggled to himself: life appeared to him exactly like the joint burning inexorably toward his fingertips – once it’s smoked it cannot be unsmoked.
There are people who just live and there are people who just survive,” Bega had said. “Americans live, we survive.
The implicit requirements of the committed relationship Joshua was pursuing with Kimiko assumed spending Saturday nights together for the purposes of intimacy.
George W. Bush spoke to the camera, his face so decisively earnest that it was clear he was lying, his button eyes lit up with amateurish subterfuge. Only truly great men can be adept at shameless lying, Joshua thought. This dude was straining to the point of snapping.
All the players looked absurdly inept, as though they were expressly drafted to be humiliated, entrepreneurs in the industry of losing.
What would love be without mutually assured oblivion?
But nothing has ever been – nor will it ever be – the way it used to be.
Perhaps if they all remained silent for as long as possible, they’d slip out of this moment into the next one, and then the next one, until all the preceding moments were erased from memory and everything could start all over again. The ultimate American dream: the eternal present, where nothing has ever happened before what is happening now.
You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.
Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.
Don’t you wonder sometimes,” sang Bowie all the way to Kinshasa, “about sound and vision?
He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.
If someone imagines that someone loves him, and does not believe he has given any cause for it, he should love in return.