This world is painted on a wild dark metal

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.

You see ... a man like me, a cautious man, has his life all figured out according to a pattern, and then the pattern flies apart. You run around for quite a while trying to repair it, until one day you straighten up again with an armful of broken pieces, and you see that the world has gone on without you and you can never catch up with your old life, and you must begin all over again.

The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.

The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.

I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.

I ... had what Kierkegaard called 'the sickness of infinitude,' wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after. I only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled.