The scare quotes burn off like fog.

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.

Action is the universal language of success.

The Bush administration is the most diverse in history because the president fills jobs on the basis of a person's capabilities and qualifications, not on the color of his or her skin.

You can never have too many friends.

I was born in Orange, California and I grew up in Huntington Beach. I started skateboarding when I was five and continued to do so off and on over the years.

According to Time magazine, global warming is 33% worse than we thought. You know what that means? Al Gore is one-third more annoying than we thought.

I always find a couple of hecklers... I'll kinda look at them, stare at 'em, and let them know I can't be stopped.

You have to learn to accept your body. You have to learn to like what you see in the mirror. There are definitely times when I don't feel like myself, but you have to fake it until you make it.

Until you lose your mother you don't know what it is.

Don't get obsessed with not liking a movie.

Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile