The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.