To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity.

I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it.

The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

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

Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into the night, if you stand a while and look.

I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.

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