The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

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.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.