How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are...

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I...

In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There’s too much everything, more things and messages and meanings that we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible?...

Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

Do you know why I believe in the novel? It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge,...

Doesn’t our knowledge of death make life more precious?’What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It’s an anxious quivering thing

Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.

How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?” _Eric Packer

Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?

When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work...

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don’t need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can...

When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.

Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale...

I like simple men and complicated women.

I know exactly what you mean.

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.

I am the false character that follows the name around.

He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor’s yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your...

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out” – Murray (WN 285).

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it’s enough to make me proud to be an American.

Time and death: It’s the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It’s just what’s there. It was not something I planned to do.

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he’d linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total...

Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering...

Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

You need to know things the others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

‎”As pessoas nao vão morrer. Não é esse o credo da nova cultura? As pessoas vão ser absorvidas em fluxos de informações. Não entendo nada disso. Os computadores vão morrer. Já estão morrendo na sua...

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats....

As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to...

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience…For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so...

People get bitten. But I won’t.’ I found myself saying, ‘You will, you will. These snakes don’t know you find death inconceivable. They don’t know you’re young and strong and you think death applies to...

If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things.

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force,...

What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking…a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself...

Why shouldn’t his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk...

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she’d disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and...

God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.

You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels.””Its own grave-diggers,” he said.”But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They...

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soonas fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to thethroat and brain, from fear of violence to the...