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...

Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality....

Only absences were fully shared.

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It’s a terror. It’s a bareness of...

I’m completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when...

It was only after two years’ work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a...

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the...

Doesn’t seem quite real. It’s not meaningful. I can’t quite imagine myself being 73. That’s the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It’s weird.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

This happened back east of course. I’ve heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It’s a reference...

That’s why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into...

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted...

What was the barn like before it was photographed?’ he said. ‘What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions...

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.

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This...