Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

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

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.

Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.