Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.

Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)