 The language of my books has shaped me as a man. |
| In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic. |
| I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood. |
| Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom. |
| People who are powerless make an open theater of violence. |
| Rushdie is a hostage. |
| There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it. |
| If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. |
| I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language. |
| America was and is the immigrant's dream. |
| It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain. |
| People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. |
| May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan. |
| For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking. |
| It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture. |
| Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. |
| I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs. |
| In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act. |
| There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down. |
| One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. |
