It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

One of my earliest memories as a reader - I don't know how old I was, quite young - was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet".

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.

To portray America over the past twenty years or so, I would think immediately of football, probably the Super Bowl in its sumptuous suggestion of a national death wish.