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Talent Is More Erotic When It's Wasted.

-Don DeLillo

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Talent Is More Erotic

Don DeLillo

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Talent Is More Erotic When It's Wasted.

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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

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

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

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

Writing Is A Concentrated Form Of Thinking...a Young Writer Sees That With Words He Can Place Himself More Clearly Into The World. Words On A Page, That's All It Takes To Help Him Separate Himself From The Forces Around Him, Streets And People And Pressures And Feelings. He Learns To Think About These Things, To Ride His Own Sentences Into New Perceptions.

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

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

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

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

Hardship Makes The World Obscure.

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

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.

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

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

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

Fear Is Unnatural. Lightning And Thunder Are Unnatural. Pain, Death, Reality, These Are All Unnatural. We Can't Bear These Things As They Are. We Know Too Much. So We Resort To Repression, Compromise And Disguise. This Is How We Survive The Universe. This Is The Natural Language Of The Species.

We Commit Our Crimes At Night And Reveal Ourselves In The High Noon Of Studio Lights.

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

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

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 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.

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

It Was Important For Him To Believe That He'd Spent His Life Among People Who Kept Missing The Point.

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.

Talent Is More Erotic When It's Wasted.

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

The World Is Shrinking Into A Kind Of Technological Funnel. I Think People Are Drawn Into Their Technological Devices, And This Becomes A Kind Of Subjective Universe, Into Which Much Of The Rest Of The World Simply Does Not Enter.

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.

People Who Are Powerless Make An Open Theater Of Violence.

World Is Supposed To Mean Something That's Self-contained. But Nothing Is Self-contained.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

I Think Literature Has Lost It's Power. Great Novels Continue To Be Written, But They Are No Longer Changing The World.

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.

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.

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

The True Life Is Not Reducible To Words Spoken Or Written, Not By Anyone, Ever. The True Life Takes Place When We're Alone, Thinking, Feeling, Lost In Memory, Dreamingly Self-aware, The Submicroscopic Moments.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

In The American Soul There Is A Lonely Individual Standing In A Vast Landscape.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Following Rules

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

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

All Human Existence Is A Trick Of Light.

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

War Is The Ultimate Realization Of Modern Technology.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

There Are No Amateurs In The World Of Children.

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.

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

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.

Freud Is Finished, Einstein's Next.

Every Sentence Has A Truth Waiting At The End Of It And The Writer Learns How To Know It When He Finally Gets There. On One Level This 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. I've Always Seen Myself In Sentences. I Begin To Recognize Myself, Word By Word, As I Work Through A Sentence. The Language Of My Books Has Shaped Me As A Man. There's A Moral Force In A Sentence When It Comes Out Right. It Speaks The Writer's Will To Live.

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

Larger Than Life

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

Rushdie Is A Hostage.

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

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

The Term Itself--my Life--is A Desperate Overstatement.

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

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

American Writers Ought To Stand And Live In The Margins, And Be More Dangerous.

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

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?

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

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.

We Surrounded Ourselves With Smoke And Loud Noise. That's The Way We Chose To Live. I'm Prepared To Defend It.

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

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?

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)

Too Much Has Been Forgotten In The Name Of Memory.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Fame Requires Every Kind Of Excess. I Mean True Fame, A Devouring Neon, Not The Sombre Renown Of Waning Statesmen Or Chinless Kings.

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)

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.

He Said, "the Word For Moonlight Is Moonlight.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

A Person Rises On A Word And Falls On A Syllable.

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.

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

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

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

Writing Is A Form Of Personal Freedom. It Frees Us From The Mass Identity We See In The Making All Around Us.

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

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

You Become A Serious Novelist By Living Long Enough.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The Future Belongs To Crowds.

Writing Is A Concentrated Form Of Thinking.

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

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

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

Once Upon A Time

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.

Technology Is Lust Removed From Nature.

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.

America Was And Is The Immigrant's Dream.

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.

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

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.

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

Ask Yourself This Question. Do We Have To Be Humans Forever? Consciousness Is Exhausted. Back Now To Inorganic Matter. This Is What We Want. We Want To Be Stones In A Field.

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

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.

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

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

[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.

Sex Finds Us. Sex Sees Through Us. That's Why It's So Shattering. It Strips Us Of Appearances.

Out Of Some Persistent Sense Of Large-scale Ruin, We Kept Inventing Hope.

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.

Something Lurked Inside The Truth.

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

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

Longing On A Large Scale Makes History.

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

Counter Culture

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Digital Clocks Took The 'space' Out Of Time.

It Is All Falling Indelibly Into The Past.

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

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

Dying Was Just An Extended Version Of Ash Wednesday.

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

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.

Facts Are Lonely Things.

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.

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

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.

I Felt Myself Getting Whiter... What Does It Mean To Become White? How Does It Feel To See Death In The Flesh, Come To Gather You In?

The Dead Have A Presence.

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.

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

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

There Is A World Inside The World.

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.

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

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

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.´

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

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

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.

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

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