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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.

-Don DeLillo

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I Long For The

Don DeLillo

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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.

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

Insanity's So Personal. It's Hard To Know Who Shares Our Secrets.

Rushdie Is A Hostage.

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

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.

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

People Stress The Violence. That's The Smallest Part Of It. Football Is Brutal Only From A Distance. In The Middle Of It There's A Calm, A Tranquility. The Players Accept Pain. There's A Sense Of Order Even At The End Of A Running Play With Bodies Strewn Everywhere. When The Systems Interlock, There's A Satisfaction To The Game That Can't Be Duplicated. There's A Harmony.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A Mystery Novel Localizes The Awesome Force Of The Real Death Outside The Book, Winds It Tightly In A Plot.

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.

Popular Culture Is Inescapable In The U.s. Why Not Use It?

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

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

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.

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

I Quit My Job Just To Quit. I Didn't Quit My Job To Write Fiction. I Just Didn't Want To Work Anymore.

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.

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.

All Human Existence Is A Trick Of Light.

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

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

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.

I Think Silence Is The Condition You Accept As The Judgment On Your Crimes.

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

I'm Not Reclusive At All. Just Private.

To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.

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.

One Of My Earliest Memories As A Reader - I Don't Know How Old I Was, Quite Young - Was A Poem Of His, Called "fog," And I Remember The First Verse, "the Fog Comes / On Little Cat Feet".

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.

Hardship Makes The World Obscure.

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.

Somehow Pictures Always Lead To People As Masses. Books Belong To Individuals.

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)

The Greater The Scientific Advance, The More Primitive The Fear.

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.

I Embarked On My Life - I Didn't Do Anything. I Don't Have An Explanation.

A Shrewd Person Would One Day Start A Religion Based On Coincidence, If He Hasn't Already, And Make A Million.

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.

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.

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

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

In This Century The Writer Has Carried On A Conversation With Madness. We Might Almost Say Of The Twentieth-century Writer That He Aspires To Madness. Some Have Made It, Of Course, And They Hold Special Places In Our Regard. To A Writer, Madness Is A Final Distillation Of Self, A Final Editing Down. It's The Drowning Out Of False Voices.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Isn't Death The Boundary We Need?

Facts Are Lonely Things.

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

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.

I See Contemporary Violence As A Kind Of Sardonic Response To The Promise Of Consumer Fulfilment In America.

Everything That Goes On In Your Whole Life Is A Result Of Molecules Rushing Around Somewhere In Your Brain.

People Will Always Make Comparisons.

They Passed Out Of The Shade Beneath The Eaves And Flew Into Sunglare And Silence And It Was An Action She Only Partly Saw, Elusive And Mutely Beautiful, The Birds So Sunstruck They Were Consumed By Light, Disembodied, Turned Into Something Sheer And Fleet And Scatter-bright.

The Dead Have A Presence.

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

I Am Ashamed Every Day, And More Ashamed The Next.

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

Larger Than Life

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.

No Sense Of The Irony Of Human Experience, That We Are The Highest Form Of Life On Earth, And Yet Ineffably Sad Because We Know What No Other Animal Knows, That We Must Die.

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

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

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.

I Was Always Younger Than Anyone Around Me. One Day It Began To Change.

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.

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

I Watch Movies Occasionally, And I Watch Documentaries. Virtually Nothing Else.

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.

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.

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.

We Seem To Believe It Is Possible To Ward Off Death By Following Rules Of Good Grooming.

Following Rules

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.

When He Died He Would Not End. The World Would End.

Fear Is Self-awareness Raised To A Higher Level.

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

History Was Not A Matter Of Missing Minutes On The Tape. I Did Not Stand Helpless Before It. I Hewed To The Texture Of Collected Knowledge, Took Faith From The Solid And Availing Stuff Of Our Experience. Even If We Believe That History Is A Workwheel Powered By Human Blood -- Read The Speeches Of Mussolini -- At Least We've Known The Thing Together. A Single Narrative Sweep, Not Ten Thousand Wisps Of Disinformation. (82)

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

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

It Was Only When I Found Myself Writing Things I Didn't Realise I Knew That I Said, 'i'm A Writer Now.'

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.

Because Friends Have To Be Brutally Honest With Each Other. I'd Feel Terrible If I Didn't Tell You What I Was Thinking, Especially At A Time Like This

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

There Are No Amateurs In The World Of Children.

Words Are Not Necessary To One's Experience Of The True Life.

The Smoke Alarm Went Off In The Hallway Upstairs, Either To Let Us Know The Battery Had Just Died Or Because The House Was On Fire.

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

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.

Once You've Seen The Signs About The Barn, It Becomes Impossible To See The Barn.

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.

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

America Was And Is The Immigrant's Dream.

I Saw A Photograph Of A Wedding Conducted By Reverend Moon Of The Unification Church. I Wanted To Understand This Event, And The Only Way To Understand It Was To Write About It.

He Wanted Paper And Something To Write With, Some Way To Sustain A Thought, To Place It In The World.

You Become A Serious Novelist By Living Long Enough.

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

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

It Occurred To Me That Eating Is The Only Form Of Professionalism Most People Ever Attain.

Professionalism

You Shout Because It Makes You Brave Or You Want To Announce Your Recklessness.

What Did It Mean, The First Time, A Thinking Creature Looked Deeply Into Another's Eyes? Did It Take A Hundred Thousand Years Before This Happened Or It Was The First Thing They Did, Transcendingly, The Thing That Made Them Higher, Made Them Modern, The Gaze That Demonstrates We Are Lonely In Our Souls?

Air Travel Reminds Us Who We Are. It's The Means By Which We Recognize Ourselves As Modern. The Process Removes Us From The World And Sets Us Apart From Each Other. We Wander In The Ambient Noise, Checking One More Time For The Flight Coupon, The Boarding Pass, The Visa. The Process Convinces Us That At Any Moment We May Have To Submit To The Force That Is Implied In All This, The Unknown Authority Behind It, Behind The Categories, The Languages We Don't Understand. This Vast Terminal Has Been Erected To Examine Souls.

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.

People Who Are Powerless Make An Open Theater Of Violence.

It Is Possible To Be Homesick For A Place Even When You Are There.

It Was Only After Two Years' Work That It Occurred To Me That I Was A Writer. I Had No Particular Expectation That The Novel Would Ever Be Published, Because It Was Sort Of A Mess. It Was Only When I Found Myself Writing Things I Didn't Realise I Knew That I Said, 'i'm A Writer Now.' The Novel Had Become An Incentive To Deeper Thinking. That's Really What Writing Is—an Intense Form Of Thought.

When I Read Obituaries I Always Note The Age Of The Deceased. Automatically I Relate This Figure To My Own Age. Four Years To Go, I Think. Nine More Years. Two Years And I'm Dead. The Power Of Numbers Is Never More Evident Than When We Use Them To Speculate On The Time Of Our Dying.

I Have Only A Bare Working Knowledge Of The Human Brain But It's Enough To Make Me Proud To Be An American.

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

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

I Don't Consider Myself Paranoid At All. I Think I See Things Exactly As They Are.

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.

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

I've Come To Think Of Europe As A Hardcover Book, America As The Paperback Version.

Man's Guilt In History And In The Tides Of His Own Blood Has Been Complicated By Technology, The Daily Seeping Falsehearted Death.

I Would Never Write In Response To What I Believe The Public Wanted Or Needed.

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.

Talent Is More Erotic When It's Wasted.

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

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

Stories Have No Point If They Don't Absorb Our Terror.

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.

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.

There Is A World Inside The World.

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

Writing Is A Concentrated Form Of Thinking.

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.

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

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

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

The World Is Full Of Abandoned Meanings. In The Commonplace I Find Unexpected Themes And Intensities.

Being Called A 'bad Citizen' Is A Compliment To A Novelist, At Least To My Mind. That's Exactly What We Ought To Do.

I Think More Than Writers, The Major Influences On Me Have Been European Movies, Jazz, And Abstract Expressionism.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It's Not Enough To Hate Your Enemy. You Have To Understand How The Two Of You Bring Each Other To Deep Completion.

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

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

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 Was Never Either Pro-culture Or Counter-culture. I Was In A Kind Of Middle State.

Counter Culture

Time Is A Corporate Asset Now. It Belongs To The Free Market System. The Present Is Harder To Find... The Future Becomes Insistent.

I Think Fiction Comes From Everything You've Ever Done, And Said, And Dreamed, And Imagined. It Comes From Everything You've Read And Haven't Read... I Think My Work Comes Out Of The Culture Of The World Around Me. I Think That's Where My Language Comes From.

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

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

I Think Fiction Recues History From Its Confusions.

When Birds Look Into Houses, What Impossible Worlds They See.

Tourism Is The March Of Stupidity.

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

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

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.

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.

The Shock, The Power Of An Ordinary Life. It Is A Thing You Could Not Invent With Banks Of Computers In A Dust-free Room.

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.

Film Is More Than The Twentieth-century Art. It's Another Part Of The Twentieth-century Mind. It's The World Seen From Inside. We've Come To A Certain Point In The History Of Film. If A Thing Can Be Filmed, The Film Is Implied In The Thing Itself. This Is Where We Are. The Twentieth Century Is On Film. You Have To Ask Yourself If There's Anything About Us More Important Than The Fact That We're Constantly On Film, Constantly Watching Ourselves.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Technology And Violence Are Interdependent.

These Are The Days After. Everything Now Is Measured By After.

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

People Think About Who They Are In The Stillest Hour Of The Night.

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.

It's True That Some Of Us Become Better Writers By Living Long Enough. But This Is Also How We Become Worse Writers. The Trick Is To Die In Between.

We Need Time To Lose Interest In Things.

Something Is Always Happening, Even On The Quietest Days And Deep Into The Night, If You Stand A While And Look.

Only A Catastrophe Gets Our Attention. We Want Them, We Depend On Them. As Long As They Happen Somewhere Else.

All Who Have Their Reward On Earth, The Fruits Of Painful Superstition And Blind Zeal, Naught Seeking But The Praise Of Men, Here Find Fit Retribution, Empty As Their Deeds.

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.

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.

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

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?

Even When You Self-destruct, You Want To Fail More, Lose More, Die More Than Others, Stink More Than Others.

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.

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

In Our World We Sleep And Eat The Image And Pray To It And Wear It Too.

In Cities No One Notices Specific Dying. Dying Is A Quality Of The Air. It's Everywhere And Nowhere.

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.

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]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.

I Am Very Unmusical. I Can't Carry A Tune. I Would Never Be Able To Play An Instrument.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Once Upon A Time

Digital Clocks Took The 'space' Out Of Time.

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Bernard De Mandeville

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