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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.

-Don DeLillo

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What Good Is Knowledge

Don DeLillo

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

One Truth Is The Swing Of The Sentence, The Beat And Poise, But Down Deeper It's The Integrity Of The Writer As He Matches With The Language.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You Become A Serious Novelist By Living Long Enough.

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

I 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

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

America Was And Is The Immigrant's Dream.

There Are No Amateurs In The World Of Children.

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)

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.

Freud Is Finished, Einstein's Next.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Dead Have A Presence.

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

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

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.

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.

Fear Is Self-awareness Raised To A Higher Level.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I'd Like To Lose Interest In Myself.

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

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

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

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.

Too Much Has Been Forgotten In The Name Of Memory.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 Takes Close Attention To See What Is Happening In Front Of You. It Takes Work, Pious Effort, To See What You Are Looking At.

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.

Longing On A Large Scale Makes History.

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.

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

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.

Off-camera Lives Are Unverifiable.

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

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.

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.

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.´

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

Counter Culture

I'm Not Reclusive At All. Just Private.

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]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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Technology And Violence Are Interdependent.

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.

Rushdie Is A Hostage.

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.

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.

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

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

People Who Are In Power Make Their Arrangements In Secret, Largely As A Way Of Maintaining And Furthering That Power.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

He Speaks In Your Voice, American, And There's A Shine In His Eye That's Halfway Hopeful.

Technology Is Lust Removed From Nature.

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

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

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

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

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

To Be A Tourist Is To Escape Accountability.

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.

The Writer Is The Person Who Stands Outside Society, Independent Of Affiliation And Independent Of Influence.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Professionalism

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

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

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

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

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.

Evil Is Movement Towards Void.

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.

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

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

Hardship Makes The World Obscure.

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.

The Language Of My Books Has Shaped Me As A Man.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

People Will Always Make Comparisons.

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.

The Future Belongs To Crowds.

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.

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

I Don't Want To Do The Type Of Writing Where I Recite Biography, Parentage And Education. I Want To Rise Up From The Words On The Page And Do Something, Hurt Someone.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

We Need Time To Lose Interest In Things.

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

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

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

There Is A World Inside The World.

It's All About Time, Dimwit Time, Inferior Time, People Checking Watches And Other Devices, Other Reminders. This Is Time Draining Out Of Our Lives. Cities Were Built To Measure Time, To Remove Time From Nature. There's An Endless Counting Down, He Said. When You Strip Away Surfaces, When You See Into It, What's Left Is Terror. This Is The Thing That Literature Was Meant To Cure. The Epic Poem, The Bedtime Story.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Larger Than Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

There Are Times When You Want To Stop Working At Faith And Just Be Washed In A Blowing Wind That Tells You Everything.

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

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