The love of minds should last beyond lives.
The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we‘re not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it‘ll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such wor...
The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
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 is the...
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
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 to time, a statement ab...
There was something theatrical about the protest, ingratiating even. . . . There was a shadow of transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systemic hygiene, purgin...
I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.
You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool.
We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes...
Sounds like a boring life.I hope it lasts forever, she said.
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.
Billy tried to imagine the birth of Cyril's wife's baby. It would happen in grim lights violently. A dripping thing trying to clutch to its hole. Dredged up and beaten. Blood and drool and womb mud. H...
It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.
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...
You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowl...
Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let's call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let's devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build t...
That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.
He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.