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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.

-Don DeLillo

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The Smoke Alarm Went

Don DeLillo

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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.

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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

Not Long Ago, A Novelist Could Believe He Could Have An Effect On Our Consciousness Of Terror. Today, The Men Who Shape And Inflence Human Consciousness Are The Terrorists.

I Think Fiction Recues History From Its Confusions.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

In The Face Of Technology, Everything Becomes A Little Atavistic.

I Think That The Massive, Overarching, Interconnected Systems Of Technology Tend To Make Us A Little Insecure, Somewhat Pliable, And Susceptible To Half-beliefs.

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

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

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

Professionalism

[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.

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.

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

Technology And Violence Are Interdependent.

Dying Was Just An Extended Version Of Ash Wednesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

He Thinks He's Happy But It's Just A Nerve Cell In His Brain That's Getting Too Much Stimulation Or Too Little Stimulation.

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.

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.

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

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

The Instant He Knew He Loved Her, She Slipped Down His Body And Out Of His Arms

The Family Was An Art ... And The Dinner Table Was The Place It Found Expression.

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.

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

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

...because What's The Meaning Of Doing Dishes If You're Not Driven By Something Beyond Necessity.

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.

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

He'd Once Told Me That The Art Of Getting Ahead In New York Was Based On Learning How To Express Dissatisfaction In An Interesting Way. The Air Was Full Of Rage And Complaint. People Had No Tolerance For Your Particular Hardship Unless You Knew How To Entertain Them With It.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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?

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

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.

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

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

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

Counter Culture

I'd Like To Lose Interest In Myself.

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

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

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

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.

All Human Existence Is A Trick Of Light.

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.

America Was And Is The Immigrant's Dream.

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

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.

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.

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.

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The Power Of The Dead Is That We Think They See Us All The Time. The Dead Have A Presence. Is There A Level Of Energy Composed Solely Of The Dead? They Are Also In The Ground, Of Course, Asleep And Crumbling. Perhaps We Are What They Dream.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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".

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.

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

War Is The Ultimate Realization Of Modern Technology.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Stories Are Consoling, Fiction Is One Of The Consolation Prizes For Having Lived In The World.

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

Following Rules

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

A Writer Decides To Follow Some Ideas And Not Others For Reasons That Aren't Always Clear To Him. It's Often A Matter Of Intuition.

We Feel Certain That The Extraterrestrial Message Is A Mathematical Code Of Some Kind. Probably A Number Code. Mathematics Is The One Language We Might Conceivably Have In Common With Other Forms Of Intelligent Life In The Universe. As I Understand It, There Is No Reality More Independent Of Our Perception And More True To Itself Than Mathematical Reality.

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

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.

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?

There Is A World Inside The World.

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.

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

The Genius Of The Primitive Mind Is That It Can Render Human Helplessness In Noble And Beautiful Ways.

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

Digital Clocks Took The 'space' Out Of Time.

True Terror Is A Language And A Vision. There Is A Deep Narrative Structure To Terrorist Acts, And They Infiltrate And Alter Consciousness In Ways That Writers Used To Aspire To.

Narrative Structure

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

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.

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

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.

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

Too Much Has Been Forgotten In The Name Of Memory.

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

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.

Hardship Makes The World Obscure.

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.

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

I'm Not Reclusive At All. Just Private.

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

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.

Brilliant People Never Think Of The Lives They Smash, Being Brilliant.

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.

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

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

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.

The Less There Was To See, The Harder He Looked, The More He Saw. (point Omega)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Something Lurked Inside The Truth.

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

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.

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?

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

That's What In Theory Differentiates A Writer From Everyone Else. You See And Hear More Clearly.

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

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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.

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

Technology Is Lust Removed From Nature.

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

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.

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

Days Like This. I Look At You And Feel Electric. Tell Me You Don't Feel It Too."_eric Packer

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.

To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.

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

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. 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Tourism Is The March Of Stupidity.

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.

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

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

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?

Fear Is Self-awareness Raised To A Higher Level.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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Frederick William Robertson

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