Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.