That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.

There are two categories of writers, it could be said: The author who is just a voice, and the one who is also creating a picture. I belong to the latter, because I have an acute visual sense.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.