When he died he would not end. The world would end.

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

Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

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.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.