Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

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

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.