Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

Courage is important but it shouldn’t be used in making impulsive decisions or taking uncalculated actions.

Loneliness Ends With Love

Time & distance does wonders for healing & rejuvenating your soul.

The worst thing about work in the house or home is that whatever you do is destroyed laid waste or eaten within twenty-four hours.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

The scariest part of forever is that nothing is.

I came out of Bataan and I shall return!

I was never able to have three of four beers. One's too many, and ten just ain't enough. Basically it's the way I've been since high school.

Since 'tis Nature's law to change, Constancy alone is strange.

[Goodman] became famous (or notorious) for staring at a player he didn't like. It was called 'the ray' by his men.