No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

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

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

Something lurked inside the truth.

America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

I was never either pro-culture or counter-culture. I was in a kind of middle state.