If you weren't surprised by your life you wouldn't be alive. Life is surprise.

I read Mailer's Ancient Evenings with great interest because I was interested in . . . the seven souls structure, which was very helpful to me in Western Lands. And also in Place of Dead Roads. So that's Mailer.

In this world, [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant.

Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness.