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.

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

Hardship makes the world obscure.

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.

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

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.