Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.