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.

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.

You can create any product from time

I choose to be a victor, and not a victim of change.

I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for the day.

When I come home, it's about my kid, who needs to eat, needs to do homework, and needs to get to basketball. I don't have a lot of time to think about me.

I grew up thirty miles down the highway in San Marcos, and I've still got family there, so I guess I'm pretty well rooted.

Capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

The best deal that Barack Obama can get will not be the best deal to be had because he's weak and indecisive.

It's not too bad to be a sort of pop icon, you know? It's not too tough to handle.

Death may call any moment. Every moment, everyone is nearing death.