People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

Digital clocks took the 'space' out of time.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts.

We feel certain that the extraterrestrial message is a mathematical code of some kind. Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.