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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.

-Don DeLillo

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Time Seems To Pass.

Don DeLillo

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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.

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

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

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.

Tourism Is The March Of Stupidity.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Writers, Some Of Us, May Tend To See Things Before Other People Do, Things That Are Right There But Aren't Noticed In The Way That A Writer Might Notice.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I Think Fiction Recues History From Its Confusions.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 More Things I Threw Away, The More I Found.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

War Is The Ultimate Realization Of Modern Technology.

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.

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

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

What Terrorists Gain, Novelists Lose.

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 Are No Amateurs In The World Of Children.

Freud Is Finished, Einstein's Next.

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

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.

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.

People Will Not Die. Isn't This The Creed Of The New Culture? People Will Be Absorbed In Streams Of Information. I Know Nothing About This. Computers Will Die. They're Dying In Their Present Form. They're Just About Dead As Distinct Units.

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

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

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've Got Death Inside Me. It's Just A Question Of Whether Or Not I Can Outlive It.

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

The Future Belongs To Crowds.

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

Once Upon A Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardship Makes The World Obscure.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Mirrors And Images. Or Sex And Love. These Are Two Separate Systems That We Miserably Try To Link.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.

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

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 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.

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

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)

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

Digital Clocks Took The 'space' Out Of Time.

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.

Facts Are Lonely Things.

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.

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

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

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

Isn't Death The Boundary We Need?

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.

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.

People Who Are Powerless Make An Open Theater Of Violence.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

Following Rules

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

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

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

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.

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.

Some Nights I Need To Be Held. Tonight I'm A Listener. So Nice To Lie In Rumpled Sheets And Listen. Cover Me With Words.

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.

Talent Is More Erotic When It's Wasted.

He Said, "the Word For Moonlight Is Moonlight.

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

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

Technology And Violence Are Interdependent.

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.

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.

The Dead Have A Presence.

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

Professionalism

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

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.

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

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.

Too Much Has Been Forgotten In The Name Of Memory.

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'm A Novelist, Period. An American Novelist.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Longing On A Large Scale Makes History.

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

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

Fear Is Self-awareness Raised To A Higher Level.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I Work I Have A Sculptor's Sense Of The Shape Of The Words I'm Making. I Use A Machine With Larger Than Average Letters: The Bigger The Better.

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

Technology Is Lust Removed From Nature.

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

I Think It's Only In A Crisis That Americans See Other People. It Has To Be An American Crisis, Of Course. If Two Countries Fight That Do Not Supply The Americans With Some Precious Commodity, Then The Education Of The Public Does Not Take Place. But When The Dictator Falls, When The Oil Is Threatened, Then You Turn On The Television And They Tell You Where The Country Is, What The Language Is, How To Pronounce The Names Of The Leaders, What The Religion Is All About, And Maybe You Can Cut Out Recipes In The Newspaper Of Persian Dishes.

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

People Hurried Past, The Others Of The Street, Endless Anonymous, Twenty-one Lives Per Second, Race-walking In Their Faces And Pigments, Sprays Of Fleetest Being.

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

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?

Coming And Going I Am Leaving. I Will Go And Come. Leaving Has Come To Me. We All, Shall All, Will All Be Left. Because I Am Here And Where. And I Will Go Or Not Or Never. And I Have Seen What I Will See. If I Am Where I Will Be. Because Nothing Comes Between Me.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doesn't Seem Quite Real. It's Not Meaningful. I Can't Quite Imagine Myself Being 73. That's The Age My Father Was! [laughter.] How Can I Be His Age? It's Weird.

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

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.

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".

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

People Will Always Make Comparisons.

We Need Time To Lose Interest In Things.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

People Say Great Art Is Immortal. I Say There's Something Mortal In It. It Carries A Glimpse Of Death.

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.

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

The Writer Is Driven By His Conviction That Some Truths Aren't Arrived At So Easily, That Life Is Still Full Of Mystery, That It Might Be Better For You, Dear Reader, If You Went Back To The Living Section Of Your Newspaper Because This Is The Dying Section And You Don't Really Want To Be Here.

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 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

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.

Dying Was Just An Extended Version Of Ash Wednesday.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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