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A Dead Afternoon In A Dark Bar Was Not The Worst Of Fates.
-Don DeLillo
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A Dead Afternoon In

Don DeLillo
...
A Dead Afternoon In A Dark Bar Was Not The Worst Of Fates.

Understanding the Quote: "a dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of..."

This quote by Don DeLillo reflects deeply on the theme of fate. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Fate, Dark, Bars, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Don DeLillo interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is celebrated for insightful thoughts on fate and dark. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

Views: 76643
Topic
Fate
Dark
Bars
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Stories Have No Point If They Don't Absorb Our Terror.
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Everything I've Stated May Prove To Be Total Poppycock.... Perhaps Time Will Tell. Perhaps Time Will Do Nothing Of The Kind.
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Maybe When We Die, The First Thing We'll Say Is 'i Know This Feeling. I Was Here Before'.
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Let's Enjoy The Aimless Days While We Still Can.
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If Any Art Form Can Accommodate Contemporary Culture, It's The Novel. It's So Malleable - It Can Incorporate Essays, Poetry, Film. Maybe The Challenge For The Novelist Is To Stretch His Art And His Language, To The Point Where It Can Finally Describe What's Happening Around Him.
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A Writer Decides To Follow Some Ideas And Not Others For Reasons That Aren't Always Clear To Him. It's Often A Matter Of Intuition.
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Naturally A Direct Comparison Of Terrorist And Novelist Is Complete Nonsense. But There Was Once A Time When The Novelist Also Had Some Influence On How His Contemporaries Thought, The Way They Saw The World, The Way They Lived.
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[i]n The American Soul There Is A Lonely Individual Standing In A Vast Landscape. 
he Is Either On A Horse Or Driving A Car, Depending, And Either Way He’s Carrying A Gun. 
this Is One Of The Essential Images In American Mythology.
Lonely
Horse
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...because What's The Meaning Of Doing Dishes If You're Not Driven By Something Beyond Necessity.
Driven
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We Live In An Age Of Rapid Mass Media, Television, Internet. They Determine Our Tempo, Not Books.
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Before Pop Art, There Was Such A Thing As Bad Taste. Now There's Kitsch, Schlock, Camp, And Porn.
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Money Has Lost Its Narrative Quality The Way Painting Did Once Upon A Time. Money Is Talking To Itself.
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Silence, Exile, Cunning And So On... It's My Nature To Keep Quiet About Most Things. Even The Ideas In My Work.
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Years After I'd Seen Him For The Last Time I Found Myself Thinking Of Him Unexpectedly And Often. You Know How Certain Places Grow Powerful In The Mind With Passing Time. In Those Early Morning Dreams When I Come Back To Bed After A Sleepy Pee And Fall Quickly Into The Narrow End Of The Night, There Is One Set Of Streets I Keep Returning To, One Dim Mist Of Railroad Rooms And Certain Figures Reappear, Borderline Ghosts.
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That's The World Out There, Little Green Apples And Infectious Disease.
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All Human Existence Is A Trick Of Light.
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The More Things I Threw Away, The More I Found.
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The Less There Was To See, The Harder He Looked, The More He Saw. (point Omega)
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We Need Time To Lose Interest In Things.
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There Is A Balance, A Kind Of Standoff Between The Time Continuum And The Human Entity, Our Frail Bundle Of Soma And Psyche. We Eventually Succumb To Time, It's True, But Time Depends On Us. We Carry It In Our Muscles And Genes, Pass It On To The Next Set Of Time-factoring Creatures, Our Brown-eyed Daughters And Jug-eared Sons, Or How Would The World Keep Going. Never Mind The Time Theorists, The Cesium Devices That Measure The Life And Death Of The Smallest Silvery Trillionth Of A Second.... We Were The Only Crucial Clocks, Our Minds And Bodies, Way Stations For The Distribution Of Time.
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I Don't Know What I Think About Certain Subjects, Even Today, Until I Sit Down And Try To Write About Them.
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Human Existence Had To Have A Deeper Source Than Our Own Dank Fluids. Dank Or Rank. There Had To Be A Force Behind It, A Principal Being Who Was And Is And Ever Shall Be.
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Mirrors And Images. Or Sex And Love. These Are Two Separate Systems That We Miserably Try To Link.
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There's Something Nearly Mystical About Certain Words And Phrases That Float Through Our Lives. It's Computer Mysticism. Words That Are Computer Generated To Be Used On Products That Might Be Sold Anywhere From Japan To Denmark - Words Devised To Be Pronounceable In A Hundred Languages. And When You Detach One Of These Words From The Product It Was Designed To Serve, The Words Acquires A Chantlike Quality.
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He Speaks In Your Voice, American, And There's A Shine In His Eye That's Halfway Hopeful.
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Why Is It So Hard To Be Serious, So Easy To Be Too Serious?
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There's Always A Period Of Curious Fear Between The First Sweet-smelling Breeze And The Time When The Rain Comes Cracking Down.
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Ecology Is Boring For The Same Reason That Destruction Is Fun.
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... There Was An Honesty Inherent In Bulkiness If It Is Just The Right Amount.
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The World Is Full Of Abandoned Meanings. In The Commonplace I Find Unexpected Themes And Intensities.
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She Became Confused When She Stepped Onto An Escalator That Wasn't Working.
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There Are Dead Stars That Still Shine Because Their Light Is Trapped In Time. Where Do I Stand In This Light, Which Does Not Strictly Exist? (155)
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The World Isn't Going To Be Destroyed, But You Don't Feel Safe Anymore In Your Plane Or Train Or Office Or Auditorium.
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I'm A Novelist, Period. An American Novelist.
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Making Things Difficult For The Reader Is Less An Attack On The Reader Than It Is On The Age And Its Facile Knowledge-market.
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He Thinks He's Happy But It's Just A Nerve Cell In His Brain That's Getting Too Much Stimulation Or Too Little Stimulation.
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I See Contemporary Violence As A Kind Of Sardonic Response To The Promise Of Consumer Fulfilment In America.
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Out Of Some Persistent Sense Of Large-scale Ruin, We Kept Inventing Hope.
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The Power Of The Dead Is That We Think They See Us All The Time. The Dead Have A Presence. Is There A Level Of Energy Composed Solely Of The Dead? They Are Also In The Ground, Of Course, Asleep And Crumbling. Perhaps We Are What They Dream.
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In This Country There Is A Universal Third Person, The Man We All Want To Be. Advertising Has Discovered This Man. It Uses Him To Express The Possibilities Open To The Consumer. To Consume In America Is Not To Buy; It Is To Dream. Advertising Is The Suggestion That The Dream Of Entering The Third Person Singular Might Possibly Be Fulfilled.
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I Hate My Life. I'm At The Point Where I Want To Hear About Other People's Lives. It's Like Switching From Fiction To Biography.
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Perhaps We've Invented Conspiracies For Our Own Psychic Well-being, To Heal Ourselves.
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To Portray America Over The Past Twenty Years Or So, I Would Think Immediately Of Football, Probably The Super Bowl In Its Sumptuous Suggestion Of A National Death Wish.
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In My Experience, Writing A Novel Tends To Create Its Own Structure, Its Own Demands, Its Own Language, Its Own Ending. So For Much Of The Period In Which I'm Writing, I'm Waiting To Understand What's Going To Happen Next, And How And Where It's Going To Happen. In Some Cases, Fairly Early In The Process, I Do Know How A Book Will End. But Most Of The Time, Not At All, And In This Particular Case, Many Questions Are Still Unanswered, Even Though I've Been Working For Months.
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A Dead Afternoon In A Dark Bar Was Not The Worst Of Fates.
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We Don't Really Know How Technology Will Affect Narrative. That's The Question. See, People Used To Say That The Novel Is Going To Die, But They Would Never Say That Movies Will Die With It, When In Fact All Forms Depend On The Narrative. I Think If One Of Them Fails, The Others Are Going To Fail As Well. Maybe This Will Happen To Both Forms, And Maybe Movies Will Take A Totally Different Direction With Fiction.
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Days Like This. I Look At You And Feel Electric. Tell Me You Don't Feel It Too."_eric Packer
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Longing On A Large Scale Makes History.
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Isn't Death The Boundary We Need? Doesn't It Give A Precious Texture To Life, A Sense Of Definition? You Have To Ask Yourself Whether Anything You Do In This Life Would Have Beauty And Meaning Without The Knowledge You Carry Of A Final Line, A Border Or Limit.
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Her Death Would Leave Me Scattered, Talking To Chairs And Pillows. Don't Let Us Die, I Want To Cry Out To That Fifth-century Sky Ablaze With Mystery And Spiral Light. Let Us Both Live Forever, In Sickness And Health, Feebleminded, Doddering, Toothless, Liver-spotted, Dim-sighted, Hallucinating. Who Decides These Things? What Is Out There? Who Are You?
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Writers, Some Of Us, May Tend To See Things Before Other People Do, Things That Are Right There But Aren't Noticed In The Way That A Writer Might Notice.
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Murray Said, ´i Don´t Trust Anybody´s Nostalgia But My Own. Nostalgia Is A Product Of Dissatisfaction And Rage. It´s A Settling Of Grievances Between The Present And The Past. The More Powerful The Nostalgia, The Closer You Come To Violence. War Is The Form Nostalgia Takes When Men Are Hard-pressed To Say Something Good About Their Country.´
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It Was The Time Of Year, The Time Of Day, For A Small Insistent Sadness To Pass Into The Texture Of Things. Dusk, Silence, Iron Chill. Something Lonely In The Bone.
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Your Brain Has A Trillion Neurons And Every Neuron Has Ten Thousand Little Dendrites. The System Of Inter-communication Is Awe-inspiring.
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To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability. Errors And Failings Don't Cling To You The Way They Do Back Home. You're Able To Drift Across Continents And Languages, Suspending The Operation Of Sound Thought. Tourism Is The March Of Stupidity.
Home
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Pain Is Just Another Form Of Information.
Pain
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Prayer Is A Practical Strategy, The Gaining Of Temporal Advantage In The Capital Markets Of Sin And Remission.
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A Novel Determines Its Own Size And Shape And I've Never Tried To Stretch An Idea Beyond The Frame And Structure It Seemed To Require.
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Not Long Ago, A Novelist Could Believe He Could Have An Effect On Our Consciousness Of Terror. Today, The Men Who Shape And Inflence Human Consciousness Are The Terrorists.
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We Commit Our Crimes At Night And Reveal Ourselves In The High Noon Of Studio Lights.
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Light
Noon
I Don't Want To Do The Type Of Writing Where I Recite Biography, Parentage And Education. I Want To Rise Up From The Words On The Page And Do Something, Hurt Someone.
Hurt
Writing
Want
Men With Secrets Tend To Be Drawn To Each Other, Not Because They Want To Share What They Know But Because They Need The Company Of The Like-minded, The Fellow Afflicted.
Men
Keeping Secrets
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Time Is A Corporate Asset Now. It Belongs To The Free Market System. The Present Is Harder To Find... The Future Becomes Insistent.
Assets
Free Market
Harder
We Seem To Believe It Is Possible To Ward Off Death By Following Rules Of Good Grooming.
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The Future Is Always A Wholeness, A Sameness. We're All Tall And Happy There,' She Said. 'this Is Why The Future Fails. It Always Fails. It Can Never Be The Cruel Happy Place We Want To Make It.
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Failing
Said
It Was Only When I Found Myself Writing Things I Didn't Realise I Knew That I Said, 'i'm A Writer Now.'
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Found
Said
Terror Is Now The World Narrative, Unquestionably. When Those Two Buildings Were Struck, And When They Collapsed, It Was, In Effect, An Extraordinary Blow To Consciousness, And It Changed Everything.
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Two
World
I Am Not Particularly Distressed By The State Of Fiction Or The Role Of The Writer. The More Marginal, Perhaps Ultimately The More Trenchant And Observant And Finally Necessary He'll Become.
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Fiction
States
Look At Those Numbers Running. Money Makes Time. It Used To Be The Other Way Around. Clock Time Accelerated The Rise Of Capitalism. People Stopped Thinking About Eternity. They Began To Concentrate On Hours, Measurable Hours,man-hours, Using Labor More Efficiently.
Running
Men
Thinking
We Surrounded Ourselves With Smoke And Loud Noise. That's The Way We Chose To Live. I'm Prepared To Defend It.
Noise
Way
Loud
Brilliant People Never Think Of The Lives They Smash, Being Brilliant.
Thinking
People
Brilliant
War Is The Ultimate Realization Of Modern Technology.
War
Technology
Realization
I Don’t Want Your Candor. I Want Your Soul In A Silver Thimble.
Soul
Want
Silver
You Live In A Tower That Soars To Heaven And Goes Unpunished By God.
Heaven
Towers
Soar
I've Never Made An Outline For Any Novel That I've Written. Never.
Made
Novel
Written
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Needs
Looks
All Plots Tend To Move Deathward. This Is The Nature Of Plots.
Moving
Plot
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.
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Fiction
Way
Time Seems To Pass. The World Happens, Unrolling Into Moments, And You Stop To Glance At A Spider Pressed To Its Web. There Is A Quickness Of Light And A Sense Of Things Outlined Precisely And Streaks Of Running Luster On The Bay. You Know More Surely Who You Are On A Strong Bright Day After A Storm When The Smallest Falling Leaf Is Stabbed With Self-awareness. The Wind Makes A Sound In The Pines And The World Comes Into Being, Irreversibly, And The Spider Rides The Wind-swayed Web.
Running
Strong
Fall
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Self
Voice
These Are The Days After. Everything Now Is Measured By After.
America Is The World's Living Myth. There's No Sense Of Wrong When You Kill An American Or Blame America For Some Local Disaster. This Is Our Function, To Be Character Types, To Embody Recurring Themes That People Can Use To Comfort Themselves, Justify Themselves And So On. We're Here To Accommodate. Whatever People Need, We Provide. A Myth Is A Useful Thing.
Character
America
People
You Gave Yourself Away, Word By Word, Every Time You Opened Your Trap To Speak.
Speak
Traps
It Is Interesting ... How Weapons Reflect The Soul Of The Maker.
War
Interesting
Soul
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Cat
Remember
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Plot
Murder
Effects
It's My Contention That Each Book Creates Its Own Structure And Its Own Length. I've Written Three Or Four Slim Books. It May Be That The Next Novel Is A Big One, But I Don't Know.
Book
Writing
Three
There Is A Set Of Balances And Rhythms To A Novel That We Can't Experience In Real Life. So I Think There Is A Sense In Which Fiction Can Rescue History From Confusion.
Real
Thinking
Confusion
There Came A Time In Every Prolonged Effort When He Had A Moment Of Near Panic, Or 'terror In A Lonely Place', The Original Semantic Content Of The Word. The Lonely Place Was His Own Mind.
Lonely
Effort
Anxiety
This Is The Whole Point Of Technology. It Creates An Appetite For Immortality On The One Hand. It Threatens Universal Extinction On The Other. Technology Is Lust Removed From Nature. - Murray (wn 285)
Technology
Hands
Lust
Everything That Goes On In Your Whole Life Is A Result Of Molecules Rushing Around Somewhere In Your Brain.
Rushing
Brain
Molecules
I Think My Work Is Influenced By The Fact That We're Living In Dangerous Times. If I Could Put It In A Sentence, In Fact, My Work Is About Just That: Living In Dangerous Times.
Thinking
Facts
Dangerous
It Frequently Happens That I Begin A Novel With Just A Visual Image Of Something, A Vague Sense Of People In Three Dimensional Space.
Space
People
Three
I Used To Think It Was Possible For An Artist To Alter The Inner Life Of The Culture. Now Bomb-makers And Gunmen Have Taken That Territory.
Taken
Artist
Thinking
The Greater The Scientific Advance, The More Primitive The Fear.
White Noise
Primitive
Greater
There's A Connection Between The Advances That Are Made In Technology And The Sense Of Primitive Fear People Develop In Response To It.
Technology
People
Connections
True Terror Is A Language And A Vision. There Is A Deep Narrative Structure To Terrorist Acts, And They Infiltrate And Alter Consciousness In Ways That Writers Used To Aspire To.
Narrative Structure
Vision
Literature
If An Idea Seems To Find Its Way Towards A Stage Setting, That's The Direction I Take. I Don't Know If I'm Trying To Achieve Anything Other Than To Follow An Idea On To The Page.
Ideas
Trying
Pages
The Genius Of Rock Music Is That It Matched The Cultural Hysteria Around It.
Rocks
Hysteria
Genius
I Am Ashamed Every Day, And More Ashamed The Next. But I Will Spend The Rest Of My Life In This Living Space Writing These Notes, This Journal, Recording My Acts And Reflections, Finding Some Honor, Some Worth At The Bottom Of Things. I Want Ten Thousand Pages That Will Stop The World.
Writing
Reflection
Space
People Will Not Die. Isn't This The Creed Of The New Culture? People Will Be Absorbed In Streams Of Information. I Know Nothing About This. Computers Will Die. They're Dying In Their Present Form. They're Just About Dead As Distinct Units.
People
Dying
Culture
Coming And Going I Am Leaving. I Will Go And Come. Leaving Has Come To Me. We All, Shall All, Will All Be Left. Because I Am Here And Where. And I Will Go Or Not Or Never. And I Have Seen What I Will See. If I Am Where I Will Be. Because Nothing Comes Between Me.
Leaving
Left
Ifs
Do People Still Shoot At Presidents? I Thought There Were More Stimulating Targets.' (20)
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President
Target
Why Are Homosexuals Addicted To Soap Opera? Because Our Lives Are A Vivid Situation.
Opera
Vivid
Soap
People Hurried Past, The Others Of The Street, Endless Anonymous, Twenty-one Lives Per Second, Race-walking In Their Faces And Pigments, Sprays Of Fleetest Being.
Past
Race
People
Clouds Are No Deterrent. Clouds Intensify The Drama, Trap And Shape The Light.
Drama
Clouds
Light
It Takes Close Attention To See What Is Happening In Front Of You. It Takes Work, Pious Effort, To See What You Are Looking At.
Effort
Attention
Happenings
The Modern Meaning Of Life's End-when Does It End? How Does It End? How Should It End? What Is The Value Of Life? How Do We Measure It?
Meaning Of Life
Doe
Modern
Technology And Violence Are Interdependent.
Technology
Violence
Doesn't Our Knowledge Of Death Make Life More Precious?' What Good Is A Preciousness Based On Fear And Anxiety? It's An Anxious Quivering Thing
Anxiety
Anxious
That's How You Write Novels Actually. You Suddenly Hit Upon Something And You Realize This Is The Path You Were Meant To Take. You'd Be A Fool If You Didn't Follow It. Perhaps It's Like Solving A Difficult Question In Pure Mathematics. There Must Be A Moment When The Solution Is So Simple And Evident That You Wonder Why You Hadn't Come Upon It Before. When You Do Come Upon It, You Know It In The Deepest Part Of Your Being. It Carries Its Own Logic.
Writing
Simple
Difficult Questions
Sitting For A Picture Is Morbid Business. A Portrait Doesn't Begin To Mean Anything Until The Subject Is Dead. This Is The Whole Point. We're Doing This To Create A Kind Of Sentimental Past For People In Decades To Come. It's Their Past, Their History We're Inventing Here. And It's Not How I Look Now That Matters. It's How I'll Look In Twenty-five Years As Clothing And Faces Change, As Photographs Change. The Deeper I Pass Into Death, The More Powerful My Picture Becomes. Isn't This Why Picture-taking Is So Ceremonial? It's Like A Wake. And I'm The Actor Made Up For The Laying-out.
Powerful
Mean
Past
I've Always Seen Myself In Sentences. I Begin To Recognize Myself, Word By Word, As I Work Through A Sentence.
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Literature
Sentences
The Force Of A Death Should Be Enormous But How Can You Know What Kind Of Man You've Killed Or Who Was The Braver And Stronger If You Have To Peer Through Layers Of Glass That Deliver The Image But Obscure The Meaning Of The Act? War Has A Conscience Or It's Ordinary Murder.
War
Men
Glasses
I've Always Felt That My Subject Was Living In Dangerous Times.
Dangerous
Subjects
Felt
Why Shouldn't The Death Of A Person You Love Bring You Into Lurid Ruin? You Don't Know How To Love The One You Love Until They Disappear Abruptly. Then You Understand How Thinly Distanced From Their Suffering, How Sparing Of Self You Often Were, Only Rarely Unguarded Of Heart, Working Your Networks Of Give-and-take.
Heart
Self
Giving
I Think Literature Has Lost It's Power. Great Novels Continue To Be Written, But They Are No Longer Changing The World.
Thinking
Literature
World
First You Look For Discipline And Control. You Want To Exercise Your Will, Bend The Language Your Way, Bend The World Your Way. You Want To Control The Flow Of Impulses, Images, Words, Faces, Ideas. But There's A Higher Place, A Secret Aspiration. You Want To Let Go. You Want To Lose Yourself In Language, Become A Carrier Or Messenger.
Letting Go
Exercise
Ideas
Rushdie Is A Hostage.
Rushdie
Hostage
Just Because It's On The Radio Doesn't Mean We Have To Suspend Belief In The Evidence Of Our Senses.
Mean
Radio
Belief
I Was Never Either Pro-culture Or Counter-culture. I Was In A Kind Of Middle State.
Counter Culture
Kind
States
The Dead Have A Presence.
Death
It's Not Enough To Hate Your Enemy. You Have To Understand How The Two Of You Bring Each Other To Deep Completion.
Hate
Two
Enemy
Only A Catastrophe Gets Our Attention. We Want Them, We Depend On Them. As Long As They Happen Somewhere Else.
Somewhere Else
Long
Want
Say Heat. Say Wet Between My Legs. Say Legs. Seriously, I Want You To. Stockings. Whisper It. The Word Is Meant To Be Whispered.
Legs
Want
Heat
To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.
Accountability
Tourists
I Embarked On My Life - I Didn't Do Anything. I Don't Have An Explanation.
Explanation
I Long For The Days Of Disorder. I Want Them Back, The Days When I Was Alive On The Earth, Rippling In The Quick Of My Skin, Heedless And Real. I Was Dumb-muscled And Angry And Real. This Is What I Long For, The Breach Of Peace, The Days Of Disarray When I Walked Real Streets And Did Things Slap-bang And Felt Angry And Ready All The Time, A Danger To Others And A Distant Mystery To Myself.
Real
Long
Dumb
The Family Was An Art ... And The Dinner Table Was The Place It Found Expression.
Family
Art
Expression
There Is No Lie In War Or Preparation Of War That Can't Be Defended.
War
Lying
Preparation
Evil Is Movement Towards Void.
Evil
Movement
Void
Nostalgia Is A Product Of Dissatisfaction And Rage. It´s A Settling Of Grievances Between The Present And The Past.
Past
Nostalgia
Rage
I Am Ashamed Every Day, And More Ashamed The Next.
Next
Ashamed
It's All About Time, Dimwit Time, Inferior Time, People Checking Watches And Other Devices, Other Reminders. This Is Time Draining Out Of Our Lives. Cities Were Built To Measure Time, To Remove Time From Nature. There's An Endless Counting Down, He Said. When You Strip Away Surfaces, When You See Into It, What's Left Is Terror. This Is The Thing That Literature Was Meant To Cure. The Epic Poem, The Bedtime Story.
Epic
Cities
People
May The Days Be Aimless. Do Not Advance Action According To A Plan.
May
Action
Plans
I Didn’t Do Anything. I Don’t Have An Explanation, I Don’t Know Why I Wanted To Write. I Did Some Short Stories At That Time, But Very Infrequently. I Quit My Job Just To Quit. I Didn’t Quit My Job To Write Fiction. I Just Didn’t Want To Work Anymore
Jobs
Writing
Fiction
The Language Of My Books Has Shaped Me As A Man.
Book
Men
Language
Any Assault On The Borders Of Perception Is Going To Seem Rash At First.
Perception
Borders
Firsts
I Do Think That In The Near Future, If It Hasn't Happened Already, People Will Be Able To Use Technology To Design Their Own Novels, Perhaps With Individuals Themselves As The Main Character. In Other Words, Everything Is Being Individualized And Narrowed.
Character
Thinking
Technology
When Birds Look Into Houses, What Impossible Worlds They See.
House
Bird
Looks
I Think More Than Writers, The Major Influences On Me Have Been European Movies, Jazz, And Abstract Expressionism.
Thinking
Jazz
Influence
I'd Like To Lose Interest In Myself.
Self
Interest
Loses
I Think If You Maintain A Force In The World That Comes Into People's Sleep, You Are Exercising A Meaningful Power.
Meaningful
Sleep
Exercise
How Many Beginnings Before You See The Lies In Your Excitement?
Lying
Excitement
Freud Is Finished, Einstein's Next.
Next
Finished
Something Is Always Happening, Even On The Quietest Days And Deep Into The Night, If You Stand A While And Look.
Night
Looks
Happenings
I Think There Is A Sense Of Last Things In My Work That Probably Comes From A Catholic Childhood.
Thinking
Childhood
Catholic
I Watch Movies Occasionally, And I Watch Documentaries. Virtually Nothing Else.
Watches
Documentaries
Watch Movie
There's A Moral Force In A Sentence When It Comes Out Right. It Speaks The Writer's Will To Live.
Literature
Moral
Speak
Everything's A Scandal. Dying's A Scandal. But We All Do It.
Dying
Scandal
There Is A World Inside The World.
World
If You Know You're Worth Nothing, Only A Gamble With Death Can Gratify Your Vanity.
Vanity
Gamble
Knows
You Have To Break Through The Structure Of Your Own Stonework Habit Just To Make Yourself Listen.
Break Through
Habit
Break
It Is All Falling Indelibly Into The Past.
Fall
Past
As Belief Shrinks From The World, It Is More Necessary Than Ever That Someone Believe. Wild-eyed Men In Caves. Nuns In Black. Monks Who Do Not Speak. We Are Left To Believe. Fools, Children. Those Who Have Abandoned Belief Must Still Believe In Us. They Are Sure They Are Right Not To Believe But They Know Belief Must Not Fade Completely. Hell Is When No One Believes.
Children
Believe
Men
I Have Only A Bare Working Knowledge Of The Human Brain But It's Enough To Make Me Proud To Be An American.
Brain
Proud
Enough
You Need To Know Things The Others Don't Know. It's What No One Knows About You That Allows You To Know Yourself.
Needs
Know Thyself
Know Yourself
Stories Are Consoling, Fiction Is One Of The Consolation Prizes For Having Lived In The World.
Fiction
Stories
World
That's What In Theory Differentiates A Writer From Everyone Else. You See And Hear More Clearly.
Theory
Differentiate
I Think It's Only In A Crisis That Americans See Other People. It Has To Be An American Crisis, Of Course. If Two Countries Fight That Do Not Supply The Americans With Some Precious Commodity, Then The Education Of The Public Does Not Take Place. But When The Dictator Falls, When The Oil Is Threatened, Then You Turn On The Television And They Tell You Where The Country Is, What The Language Is, How To Pronounce The Names Of The Leaders, What The Religion Is All About, And Maybe You Can Cut Out Recipes In The Newspaper Of Persian Dishes.
Country
Fall
Cutting
How Strange It Is. We Have These Deep Terrible Lingering Fears About Ourselves And The People We Love. Yet We Walk Around, Talk To People, Eat And Drink. We Manage To Function. The Feelings Are Deep And Real. Shouldn't They Paralyze Us? How Is It We Can Survive Them, At Least For A Little While? We Drive A Car, We Teach A Class. How Is It No One Sees How Deeply Afraid We Were, Last Night, This Morning? Is It Something We All Hide From Each Other, By Mutual Consent? Or Do We Share The Same Secret Without Knowing It? Wear The Same Disguise?
Morning
Real
Night
A Shrewd Person Would One Day Start A Religion Based On Coincidence, If He Hasn't Already, And Make A Million.
One Day
Coincidence
Persons
Only A Catastrophe Gets Our Attention. We Want Them, We Depend On Them. As Long As They Happen Somewhere Else. This Is Where California Comes In. Mud Slides, Brush Fires, Coastal Erosion, Mass Killings, Et Cetera. We Can Relax And Enjoy These Disasters Because In Our Hearts We Feel That California Deserves Whatever It Gets. Californians Invented The Concept Of Life-style. This Alone Warrants Their Doom.
Heart
Fire
Erosion
I Am Very Unmusical. I Can't Carry A Tune. I Would Never Be Able To Play An Instrument.
Play
Tunes
Able
Sometimes I See Something So Moving I Know I’m Not Supposed To Linger. See It And Leave. If You Stay Too Long, You Wear Out The Wordless Shock. Love It And Trust It And Leave.
Moving
Long
Sometimes
People Say Great Art Is Immortal. I Say There's Something Mortal In It. It Carries A Glimpse Of Death.
Art
People
Glimpse
Digital Clocks Took The 'space' Out Of Time.
Space
Digital
Clock
I Marched And I Protested Against The War In Vietnam, Along With Many, Many Thousands Of Others. But I Never Quite Understood The Bombs That Were Placed In Science Labs Or Office Buildings.
War
Office
Vietnam
I Think A Playwright Realizes After He Finishes Working On The Script That This Is Only The Beginning. What Will Happen When It Moves Into Three Dimensions?
Moving
Thinking
Three
In These Night Recitations We Create A Space Between Things As We Felt Them At The Time And As We Speak Them Now. This Is The Space Reserved For Irony, Sympathy And Fond Amusement, The Means By Which We Rescue Ourselves From The Past.
Mean
Past
Night
Bloomberg Weighed Three Hundred Pounds. This Itself Was Historical. I Revered His Weight. It Was An Affirmation Of Humanity's Reckless Potential; It Went Beyond Legend And Returned Through Mist To The Lovely Folly Of History. To Weigh Three Hundred Pounds. What Devout Vulgarity.
Humanity
Historical
Lovely
The Question Of Dying Becomes A Wise Reminder. It Cures Us Of Our Innocence Of The Future.
Wise
Dying
Innocence
World Is Supposed To Mean Something That's Self-contained. But Nothing Is Self-contained.
Mean
Self
World
America Can Be Saved Only By What It's Trying To Destroy.
America
Trying
Saved
It's Impossible To Write About The Kennedy Assassination And Its Aftermath Without Taking Note Of Twenty-five Years Of Paranoia Which Has Collected Around That Event.
Writing
Years
Twenties
He Took Pains To Avoid Self-depreciation, Self-mockery, Ambiguity, Irony, Subtlety, Vulnerability, A Civilized World-weariness And A Tragic Sense Of History--the Very Things, He Says, That Are Most Natural To Him.
Pain
Self
World
People Think About Who They Are In The Stillest Hour Of The Night. I Carry This Thought, The Child's Mystery And Terror Of This Thought, I Feel This Immensity In My Soul Every Second Of My Life.
Children
Night
Thinking
Look Past The Violence. There Is A Wonderful Brimming Spirit Of Innocence And Fun.
Fun
Past
Looks
There Are Two Categories Of Writers, It Could Be Said: The Author Who Is Just A Voice, And The One Who Is Also Creating A Picture. I Belong To The Latter, Because I Have An Acute Visual Sense.
Two
Voice
Creating
People Will Always Make Comparisons.
People
Comparison
I Think Fiction Recues History From Its Confusions.
Thinking
Confusion
Fiction
What You See Is Not What We See. What You See Is Distracted By Memory, By Being Who You Are, All This Time, For All These Years.
Memories
Years
Distracted
A Catholic Is Raised With The Idea That He Will Die Any Minute Now And If He Doesn't Live His Life In A Certain Way, This Death Is An Introduction To An Eternity Of Pain.
Pain
Ideas
Catholic
California Deserves Whatever It Gets. Californians Invented The Concept Of Life-style. This Alone Warrants Their Doom.
California
Style
Doom
Doesn't Seem Quite Real. It's Not Meaningful. I Can't Quite Imagine Myself Being 73. That's The Age My Father Was! [laughter.] How Can I Be His Age? It's Weird.
Meaningful
Laughter
Father
Insanity's So Personal. It's Hard To Know Who Shares Our Secrets.
Insanity
Secret
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