What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.

It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.

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.

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.

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