In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.

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

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.