I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

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

I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence.

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

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