The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not.

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means.

Perhaps violence, like pornography, is some kind of an evolutionary standby system, a last-resort device for throwing a wild joker into the game?

My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.

It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction . . . some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland.

I've never suffered from writer's block. I have plenty of ideas, sometimes too many. I've always had a strong imagination. If it dries up I'll stop and look for another career.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.