There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.

We need time to lose interest in things.

If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.