A writer decides to follow some ideas and not others for reasons that aren't always clear to him. It's often a matter of intuition.

I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read... I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

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

The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. (Point Omega)