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 remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.

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

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.

The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

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 usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.