I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.

Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.