What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

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.

The book of Job does not set out to answer the problem of suffering, but to proclaim a God so great that no answer is needed.

Live in the present. It won't last too long.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

If you scratch a great photograph you find two things: a painting and a photograph.

I don't hate homosexuals. I love homosexuals. It's the sin of homosexuality I hate.

I believe there are many soul mates, because my soul has a lot of different facets and it needs a lot of different.

you don't know what you think unless you say it.

I always feel scared and insecure on a film set. I don't know any other way.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend.

I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.