I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

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.

We all have 10, 000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.

Ohana means family - no one gets left behind, and no one is ever forgotten.' <3

Nobody is poor unless he stand in need of justice.

It is certainly important to be looking for cures to medical disorders, but it is equally important to conduct research on human health and well-being.

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists.

You're never the same. You're degrading, or you're getting better. You don't stay the same.

Ive been an engineer, barman, skip lorry driver, coalman, boat window manufacturer, contract grass cutter and builder.

I'm not trying to be a big shot or anything like that, but I get my drinks half price.

Of course I should love to throw a toothbrush into a bag, and just go, quite vaguely, without any plans or even a real destination. It is the Wanderlust.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.