I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.