Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

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.

I'm just trying to outrun a broken heart, which is nothing to sneeze at, for a broken heart breaks a person.

I hoped there would be a better process. But it is final -- I will not participate .

I had a couple come in with a negative amortization mortgage on a house that costs way too much relative to their income. They're consuming real estate, not investing in it.

I'm not better than the next trader, just quicker at admitting my mistakes and moving on to the next opportunity.

If one is of the masculine gender, a poodle is the insignia of one's deviation.

If we wish to follow Christ closely, we cannot choose an easy, quiet life. It will be a demanding life, but full of joy.

If you try to serve people, it impresses them. If you try to impress people it irritates them.

It's nice to always make an effort when you get photographed.

A man can get killed in there.

You get a lot of fame, but haven't created anything musically.