It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I’d already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one...

Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

Creation is much in need of ordering.

In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice...

Chance was just an order that you hadn’t yet perceived.

Art is not a mobocracy. It’s a republic.

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed–linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except...

Reading may be the last secretive behavior that is neither pathological or prosecutable. It is certainly the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. For the stream of a narrative overflows the banks of the real....

And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African...

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and...

Sooner or later, all men will do and know all things.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

Only keep still, wait, and hear, and the world will open.

The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.