I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

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.

The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements.

Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.