He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

It's impossible to write about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath without taking note of twenty-five years of paranoia which has collected around that event.

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

In the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape.