Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Everything I've stated may prove to be total poppycock.... Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind.
Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.
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.
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.
There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
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.
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.
Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.
There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.
Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.
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.
Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.
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.
Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.
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?
It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.
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.
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.
There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
The 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?
Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.
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.
Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? (155)
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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 that the massive, overarching, interconnected systems of technology tend to make us a little insecure, somewhat pliable, and susceptible to half-beliefs.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.