You don't believe in heaven? A nun?''If you don't, why should I?''If you did, maybe I would.''If I did, you would not have to.
You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools.
Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writ...
Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore?I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt.What guilt?The guilt of being innocent victims.
When someone asks whether they have bourbon, the bartender says smugly, ‘Yes, of course, James Beam, very good.’ James Beam. That is
When it rains out, it also rains in.
When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.We're all drawn to remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful. Beautiful and a litt...
What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own...
What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone witho...
What is a nebulous mass, just out of idle curiosity?A possible growth in the body.And it's called nebulous because you can't get a clear picture of it.We get very clear pictures. The imaging block tak...
What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.
Weede si alzò in piedi per un secondo e piegò leggermente le ginocchia - come faceva sempre mio padre quando le mutande gli si incagliavano in qualche anfratto delle regioni inguinali, spiegando a me...
We saw a cloudwall hung many miles to the east and hawks floating in the unforced motion that makes you think they’ve been up there, the same two birds since bible times.
We need time to lose interest in things.
We listen to the old radio shows. Light flares and spreads across the blue-banded edge, sunrise, sunset, the urban grids in shadow. There is a sweetness in the tenor voice of the young man singing, a...
We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with sugge...
We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.
Transient pleasures, drastic measures.
To be a tourist is to escape accountability.
Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge inve...