Once there are good sentences on the page, I can feel a loyalty to them and start following their logic, and take refuge from myself.

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease.

I like desires like childrenand their playsthat tease me now and then intoknowing life.

I'd go from film to film and almost detach from one world and jump in another. I was living as these people and not having a self. I didn't know who I was. And things just get really dark.

I have an affinity for Africa, especially East Africa, and Kansas looks very much like that.

All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.

Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.

Hinduism is not a codified religion.

Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.