Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

Images break with a small ping, their destruction is as wonderful as their being, they are essentially instruments of torture exploding through the individual's calloused capacity to feel undifferentiated emotions full of longing and dissatisfaction and monumentality.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.

There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.