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

You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.

Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.

And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.