The love of minds should last beyond lives.

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate...

Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we cam, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration.

I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could...

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.

He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.

I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.

Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood...

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in...

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There...

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

…the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the...

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. – Murray (WN 285)

Everything was on television last night

When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I’m dead....

Then they’re always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can’t buy what they’re selling, you’re a zero in the system.

But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [… N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana. That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get...

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...