The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

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

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. 
He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. 
This is one of the essential images in American mythology.