For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

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

Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.