Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.

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

We don't really know how technology will affect narrative. That's the question. See, people used to say that the novel is going to die, but they would never say that movies will die with it, when in fact all forms depend on the narrative. I think if one of them fails, the others are going to fail as well. Maybe this will happen to both forms, and maybe movies will take a totally different direction with fiction.

Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

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