I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.

People will not die. Isn't this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information. I know nothing about this. Computers will die. They're dying in their present form. They're just about dead as distinct units.

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

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.