The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.

Music is dangerous in so many ways. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

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.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.