I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let's not say men. Let's say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.

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

Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.