True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

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

It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.