It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.