A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain.

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

The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination.