I felt myself getting whiter... What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in?

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

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

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.