Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.

In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

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

I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.

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.