A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

I never wanted to change the world. Norman Mailer wanted to, he set himself the task of changing the consciousness of our age. And I think he came pretty close, in the 1960s, to actually managing to do it. But me? No, no, I never wanted anything like that. I'm not Maileresque.

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.