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...

You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.

It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t...

Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the...

The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the...

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...