People who want their love easy don't really want love.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the realm of politics, on some level.

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are never quite felt, existing only as the residue of hard work, or more as satisfaction than thrill.

I had been thinking about rubber all along. Like as the novel's element, or base material. A lot of artists in the late '60s and early '70s worked with rubber and other forms that seemed like they connoted industrial detritus. Robert Morris, Eva Hesse.