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.

The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

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

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

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.