The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.

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

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.