I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

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.

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

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)