The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

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.

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.