Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

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.

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