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For Me, Wellbehaved Books With Neat Plots And Worked-out Endings Seem Somewhat Quaint In The Face Of The Largely Incoherent Reality Of Modern Life; And Then Again Fiction, At Least As I Write It And Think Of It, Is A Kind Of Religious Meditation In Which Language Is The Final Enlightenment, And It Is Language, In Its Beauty, Its Ambiguity And Its Shifting Textures, That Drives My Work.

-Don DeLillo

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For Me, Wellbehaved Books

Don DeLillo

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For Me, Wellbehaved Books With Neat Plots And Worked-out Endings Seem Somewhat Quaint In The Face Of The Largely Incoherent Reality Of Modern Life; And Then Again Fiction, At Least As I Write It And Think Of It, Is A Kind Of Religious Meditation In Which Language Is The Final Enlightenment, And It Is Language, In Its Beauty, Its Ambiguity And Its Shifting Textures, That Drives My Work.

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The Excitement Of Theatre Is Palpable But The Frustrations, And The Complete Absence Of A Definitive Evening - The Play As Text Means Practically Nothing In A Way - , There's No Particular Performance That Is Definitive In The Way A Novel Is A Solid Object You Hold In Your Hands And Here It Is. You Can't Say That About A Play. If The Novel Gives Us A Sense Of Throbbing Consciousness, Theater Is Pure Soul, Beautiful And Elusive.

My Attitudes Aren't Directed Toward Characters At All. I Don't Feel Sympathetic Toward Some Characters, Unsympathetic Toward Others. I Don't Love Some Characters, Feel Contempt For Others. They Have Attitudes; I Don't.

Do People Still Shoot At Presidents? I Thought There Were More Stimulating Targets.' (20)

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.

Everything Is Barely Weeks. Everything Is Days. We Have Minutes To Live.

Some People Are Larger Than Life. Hitler Is Larger Than Death.

Larger Than Life

The Less Important You Are In An Office, The More They Expect The Happy Smile.

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.

Why Is It So Hard To Be Serious, So Easy To Be Too Serious?

I've Always Liked Being Relatively Obscure. I Feel That's Where I Belong, That's Where My Work Belongs.

At Night The Sky Was Very Near, Sprawled In Star Smoke And Gamma Cataclysms, But She Didn't See It The Way She Used To, As Soul Extension, Dumb Guttural Wonder, A Thing That Lived Outside Language In The Oldest Part Of Her.

There's Never A Dearth Of Reasons To Shoot At The President.

You Become A Serious Novelist By Living Long Enough.

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.

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.

A Writer Takes Earnest Measures To Secure His Solitude And Then Finds Endless Ways To Squander It.

Tourism Is The March Of Stupidity.

I Don't Know What I Think About Certain Subjects, Even Today, Until I Sit Down And Try To Write About Them.

Certainly I've Never Tried To Imagine What The Future Will Hold. It's A Hopeless Endeavor To Try To Do Such A Thing.

Before Pop Art, There Was Such A Thing As Bad Taste. Now There's Kitsch, Schlock, Camp, And Porn.

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.

You Gave Yourself Away, Word By Word, Every Time You Opened Your Trap To Speak.

The Question Of Dying Becomes A Wise Reminder. It Cures Us Of Our Innocence Of The Future.

There Is No Lie In War Or Preparation Of War That Can't Be Defended.

When You Try To Unravel Something You've Written, You Belittle It In A Way. It Was Created As A Mystery.

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.

The True Life Is Not Reducible To Words Spoken Or Written, Not By Anyone, Ever.

The Difference Between The World Of Pictures And The World Of Printed Matter Is Extraordinary And Hard To Define. A Picture Is Like The Masses: A Multitude Of Impressions. A Book On The Other Hand, With Its Linear Advance Of Words And Characters Seems To Be Connected To Individual Identity.

Clouds Are No Deterrent. Clouds Intensify The Drama, Trap And Shape The Light.

There's A Connection Between The Advances That Are Made In Technology And The Sense Of Primitive Fear People Develop In Response To It.

Hardship Makes The World Obscure.

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?

How Many Beginnings Before You See The Lies In Your Excitement?

All Plots Tend To Move Deathward. This Is The Nature Of Plots.

If The World Is Where We Hide From Ourselves, What Do We Do When The World Is No Longer Accessible? We Invent A False Name, Invent A Destiny, Purchase A Firearm Through The Mail.

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.

I'm Very Concerned With Questions Of Language. This Is What I Think Of When I Think Of Myself As A Writer: I'm Someone Who Writes Sentences And Paragraphs. I Think Of The Sentence - Not Only What It Shares But, In A Sense, What It Looks Like. I Like To Match Words Not Only In A Way That Convey A Meaning, Possibly An Indirect Meaning, But Even At Times Words That Have A Kind Of Visual Correspondence.

In My Experience, Writing A Novel Tends To Create Its Own Structure, Its Own Demands, Its Own Language, Its Own Ending.

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?

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.

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.

Prayer Is A Practical Strategy, The Gaining Of Temporal Advantage In The Capital Markets Of Sin And Remission.

The More Things I Threw Away, The More I Found.

Everything's A Scandal. Dying's A Scandal. But We All Do It.

What Good Is Knowledge If It Just Floats In The Air? It Goes From Computer To Computer. It Changes And Grows Every Second Of Every Day. But Nobody Actually Knows Anything.

You Live In A Tower That Soars To Heaven And Goes Unpunished By God.

In Fiction, I Tend To Write Fairly Realistic Dialogue-not Always, And It Tends To Vary From Book To Book. But In Many Books, There Is A Colloquialism Of Address. The Characters Will Speak In A Quite Idiosyncratic Way Sometimes.

Why Something And Not Nothing? Why Music And Not Noise?

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.

When My Head Is In The Typewriter The Last Thing On My Mind Is Some Imaginary Reader. I Don't Have An Audience; I Have A Set Of Standards.

I'm A Novelist, Period. An American Novelist.

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.

Writers In Repressive Societies Are Considered Dangerous. That's Why So Many Of Them Are In Jail.

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.

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.

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.

Past, Present And Future Are Not Amenities Of Language. Time Unfolds Into The Seamsof Being. It Passes Through You, Making And Shaping.

Maybe When We Die, The First Thing We'll Say Is 'i Know This Feeling. I Was Here Before'.

People Had No Tolerance For Your Particular Hardship Unless You Knew How To Entertain Them With It.

Isn't Death The Boundary We Need?

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.

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.

I Like The Construction Of Sentences And The Juxtaposition Of Words-not Just How They Sound Or What They Mean, But Even What They Look Like.

The Novel Is The Dream Release, The Suspension Of Reality That History Needs To Escape Its Own Brutal Confinements.

War Is The Ultimate Realization Of Modern Technology.

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.

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.

There Is A World Inside The World.

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.

America Can Be Saved Only By What It's Trying To Destroy.

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

The Genius Of Rock Music Is That It Matched The Cultural Hysteria Around It.

Fame And Secrecy Are The High And Low Ends Of The Same Fascination.

What Terrorists Gain, Novelists Lose.

Silence, Exile, Cunning And So On... It's My Nature To Keep Quiet About Most Things. Even The Ideas In My Work.

It's Healthier To Reject Certain Cautions Than Fall In Line.

Something Lurked Inside The Truth.

The Best Moments Involve A Loss Of Control. It's A Kind Of Rapture, And It Can Happen With Words And Phrases Fairly Often - Completely Surprising Combinations That Make A Higher Kind Of Sense, That Come To You Out Of Nowhere. But Rarely For Extended Periods, For Paragraphs And Pages - I Think Poets Must Have More Access To This State Than Novelists Do.

Some People Fake Their Death, I'm Faking My Life.

Famous People Don't Want To Be Told That You Have A Quality In Common With Them. It Makes Them Think There's Something Crawling In Their Clothes.

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?

Every Advance In Knowledge And Technique Is Matched By A New Kind Of Death, A New Strain. Death Adapts, Like A Viral Agent.

I Think Fiction Recues History From Its Confusions.

And What's The Point Of Waking Up In The Morning If You Don't Try To Match The Enormousness Of The Known Forces In The World With Something Powerful In Your Own Life?

That's Why People Take Vacations. No To Relax Or Find Excitement Or See New Places. To Escape The Death That Exists In Routine Things.

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.

There Are No Amateurs In The World Of Children.

That's The World Out There, Little Green Apples And Infectious Disease.

Capital Burns Off The Nuance In A Culture. Foreign Investment, Global Markets, Corporate Acquisitions, The Flow Of Information Through Transnational Media, The Attenuating Influence Of Money That's Electronic And Sex That's Cyberspaced, Untouched Money And Computer-safe Sex, The Convergence Of Consumer Desire--not That People Want The Same Things, Necessarily, But That They Want The Same Range Of Choices.

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.´

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.

Keeping Secrets

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.

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.

The World Isn't Going To Be Destroyed, But You Don't Feel Safe Anymore In Your Plane Or Train Or Office Or Auditorium.

There Were Moments When She Wasn't Talking So Much As Fading Into Time, Dropping Back Into Some Funnelled Stretch Of Recent Past.

What We Are Reluctant To Touch Often Seems The Very Fabric Of Our Salvation.

Let's Enjoy The Aimless Days While We Still Can.

Everyone Who Does Not Live In Berlin Lives In Brooklyn Now.

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.

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)

There's A Curious Knot That Binds Novelists And Terrorists...years Ago I Used To Think It Was Possible For A Novelist To Alter The Inner Life Of The Culture. Now Bomb-makers And Gunmen Have Taken That Territory. They Make Raids On Human Consciousness. What Writers Used To Do Before We Were All Incorporated.

For Most People, There Are Only Two Places In The World. Where They Live And Their Tv Set. If A Thing Happens On Television, We Have Every Right To Find It Fascinating, Whatever It Is.

Ecology Is Boring For The Same Reason That Destruction Is Fun.

War Is The Form Nostalgia Takes When Men Are Hard-pressed To Say Something Good About Their Country.

I'd Like To Lose Interest In Myself.

There's Always A Period Of Curious Fear Between The First Sweet-smelling Breeze And The Time When The Rain Comes Cracking Down.

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.

I've Always Felt That My Subject Was Living In Dangerous Times.

You Need To Know Things The Others Don't Know. It's What No One Knows About You That Allows You To Know Yourself.

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.

Just Because It's On The Radio Doesn't Mean We Have To Suspend Belief In The Evidence Of Our Senses.

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.

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.

All Human Existence Is A Trick Of Light.

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

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.

The Cheesecake Was Smooth And Lush, With The Personality Of A Warm And Well-to-do Uncle Who Knows A Hundred Dirty Jokes And Will Die Of Sexual Exertions In The Arms Of His Mistress.

There's A Moral Force In A Sentence When It Comes Out Right. It Speaks The Writer's Will To Live.

I Understand There Are Some Men Who Are Only Half Here. Let's Not Say Men. Let's Say People. People Who Are More Or Less Obscure At Times.

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.

Off-camera Lives Are Unverifiable.

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.

The Family Is The Cradle Of The World's Misinformation.

I Slept For Four Years. I Didn't Study Much Of Anything. I Majored In Something Called Communication Arts.

I Am Not Comfortable With Abstract Writing, Stories That Look Like Essays: You Have To See, I Need To See.

I've Always Seen Myself In Sentences. I Begin To Recognize Myself, Word By Word, As I Work Through A Sentence.

Writing Is A Form Of Personal Freedom. It Frees Us From The Mass Identity We See In The Making All Around Us. In The End, Writers Will Write Not To Be Outlaw Heroes Of Some Underculture But Mainly To Save Themselves, To Survive As Individuals.

When I Work, I'm Just Translating The World Around Me In What Seems To Be Straightforward Terms. For My Readers, This Is Sometimes A Vision That's Not Familiar. But I'm Not Trying To Manipulate Reality. This Is Just What I See And Hear.

... There Was An Honesty Inherent In Bulkiness If It Is Just The Right Amount.

She Became Confused When She Stepped Onto An Escalator That Wasn't Working.

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.

I've Never Made An Outline For Any Novel That I've Written. Never.

I Never Wanted To Change The World. Norman Mailer Wanted To, He Set Himself The Task Of Changing The Consciousness Of Our Age. And I Think He Came Pretty Close, In The 1960s, To Actually Managing To Do It. But Me? No, No, I Never Wanted Anything Like That. I'm Not Maileresque.

Changing The World

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.

Pain Is Just Another Form Of Information.

Freud Is Finished, Einstein's Next.

Perhaps We've Invented Conspiracies For Our Own Psychic Well-being, To Heal Ourselves.

If You Know You're Worth Nothing, Only A Gamble With Death Can Gratify Your Vanity.

Look Past The Violence. There Is A Wonderful Brimming Spirit Of Innocence And Fun.

It Is So Much Simpler To Bury Reality Than It Is To Dispose Of Dreams

Never Underestimate The Power Of The State To Act Out Its Own Massive Fantasies.

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.

You Have To Break Through The Structure Of Your Own Stonework Habit Just To Make Yourself Listen.

The Figure Of The Gunman In The Window Was Inextricable From The Victim And His History. This Sustained Oswald In His Cell. It Gave Him What He Needed To Live. The More Time He Spent In A Cell, The Stronger He Would Get. Everybody Knew Who He Was Now.

Making Things Difficult For The Reader Is Less An Attack On The Reader Than It Is On The Age And Its Facile Knowledge-market.

Explain Me To Myself, You’ll Make Me Choke On My Lunch. Feel Sympathy For Me, I’ll Puke Monkey Blood On Your Understated Shoes.

I'm Not Reclusive At All. Just Private.

To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.

I Think If You Maintain A Force In The World That Comes Into People's Sleep, You Are Exercising A Meaningful Power.

It Frequently Happens That I Begin A Novel With Just A Visual Image Of Something, A Vague Sense Of People In Three Dimensional Space.

California Deserves Whatever It Gets. Californians Invented The Concept Of Life-style. This Alone Warrants Their Doom.

America Was And Is The Immigrant's Dream.

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.

Difficult Questions

Any Assault On The Borders Of Perception Is Going To Seem Rash At First.

Eye Contact Was A Delicate Matter. A Quarter Second Of A Shared Glance Was A Violation Of Agreements That Made The City Operational.

Say Heat. Say Wet Between My Legs. Say Legs. Seriously, I Want You To. Stockings. Whisper It. The Word Is Meant To Be Whispered.

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.

Be Willing To Die For Your Beliefs, Or Computer Printouts Of Your Beliefs.

People Will Always Make Comparisons.

If You Reveal Everything, Bare Every Feeling, Ask For Understanding, You Lose Something Crucial To Your Sense Of Yourself. You Need To Know Things That Others Don't Know. It's What No One Knows About You That Allows You To Know Yourself.

We're The Last Billionth Of A Second In The Evolution Of Matter.

Your Brain Has A Trillion Neurons And Every Neuron Has Ten Thousand Little Dendrites. The System Of Inter-communication Is Awe-inspiring.

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.

One Connection I See Between Novelists And Terrorists Is That We Both Attempt To Alter Consciousness.

May The Days Be Aimless. Do Not Advance Action According To A Plan.

Music Is Dangerous In So Many Ways. It's The Most Dangerous Thing In The World.

Every Sentence Has A Truth Waiting At The End Of It And The Writer Learns How To Know It When He Finally Gets There.

The Music I Like Best Is Kind Of Frozen In My Mind From The Sixties And Seventies. I Still Listen To The Same Jazz Music I Listened To When I Was Eighteen Years Old, And Like And Admire It Just As Much.

Plot A Murder, You're Saying. But Every Plot Is A Murder In Effect. To Plot Is To Die, Whether We Know It Or Not.

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.

Money Has Lost Its Narrative Quality The Way Painting Did Once Upon A Time. Money Is Talking To Itself.

Once Upon A Time

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.

People Who Are Powerless Make An Open Theater Of Violence.

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.

If We Are On The Outside, We Assume A Conspiracy Is The Perfect Working Of A Scheme. Silent Nameless Men With Unadorned Hearts. A Conspiracy Is Everything That Ordinary Life Is Not. It's The Inside Game, Cold, Sure, Undistracted, Forever Closed Off To Us. We Are The Flawed Ones, The Innocents, Trying To Make Some Rough Sense Of The Daily Jostle. Conspirators Have A Logic And A Daring Beyond Our Reach. All Conspiracies Are The Same Taut Story Of Men Who Find Coherence In Some Criminal Act.

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.

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.

It Is Interesting ... How Weapons Reflect The Soul Of The Maker.

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.

To A Writer, Madness Is A Final Distillation Of Self, A Final Editing Down. It's The Drowning Out Of False Voices.

You Feel Sorry For Yourself. You Think You're Missing Something And You Don't Know What It Is. You're Lonely Inside Your Life. You Have A Job And A Family And A Fully Executed Will, Already, At Your Age, Because The Whole Point Is To Die Prepared, Die Legal, With All The Papers Signed. Die Liquid, So They Can Convert To Cash.

People In Free Societies Don't Have To Fear The Pathology Of The State. We Create Our Own Frenzy, Our Own Mass Convulsions, Driven By Thinking Machines That We Have No Final Authority Over. The Frenzy Is Barely Noticeable Most Of The Time. It's Simply How We Live.

To Plot Is To Live. […] We Start Out Lives In Chaos, In Babble. As We Surge Up Into The World, We Try To Devise A Shape, A Plan. There Is Dignity In This. Your Whole Life Is A Plot, A Scheme, A Diagram. It Is A Failed Scheme But That's Not The Point. To Plot Is To Affirm Life, To Seek Shape And Control. Even After Death, Most Particularly After Death, The Search Continues. Burial Rites Are An Attempt To Complete The Scheme, In Ritual. Picture A State Funeral, Jack. It Is All Precision, Detail, Order, Design. The Nation Holds Its Breath. - (wn 292)

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.

Why Are Homosexuals Addicted To Soap Opera? Because Our Lives Are A Vivid Situation.

Everything I've Stated May Prove To Be Total Poppycock.... Perhaps Time Will Tell. Perhaps Time Will Do Nothing Of The Kind.

I Think There Is A Sense Of Last Things In My Work That Probably Comes From A Catholic Childhood.

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.

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.

I Don’t Want Your Candor. I Want Your Soul In A Silver Thimble.

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.

We Live In An Age Of Rapid Mass Media, Television, Internet. They Determine Our Tempo, Not Books.

In A Crisis The True Facts Are Whatever Other People Say They Are.

A Photograph Is A Universe Of Dots. The Grain, The Halide, The Little Silver Things Clumped In The Emulsion. Once You Get Inside A Dot, You Gain Access To Hidden Information, You Slide Into The Smallest Event. This Is What Technology Does. It Peels Back The Shadows And Redeems The Dazed And Rumbling Past. It Makes Reality Come True.

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.

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.

As Technology Advances In Complexity And Scope, Fear Becomes More Primitive.

Was She Naked?" Lasher Said. "to The Waist," Cotsakis Said. "from Which Direction?" Lasher Said.

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.

Nostalgia Is A Product Of Dissatisfaction And Rage. It´s A Settling Of Grievances Between The Present And The Past.

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