Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.

Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.