Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

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.

Every man is a poet at heart.

Young warriors are always eager for battle. Old warriors know better.

Essentially, I'm a small-part actor who's been lucky enough to play leading roles for most of his life.

Your financial success is directly related to the size of the problem you solve for other people (solve BIG problems and you'll make BIG money).

Sin rarely seems sin at first beginnings.

No choice is the wrong choice as long as you make a choice. The only wrong choice is choosing not to make one.

Just because you're funny doesn't mean you get to be cruel.

It was a sobering experience.

Leaders teach. They motivate. They care. Leaders make sure that the way to success is always broad enough and straight enough for others to follow.

Shop for security over happiness and we buy it at that price.