"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."

"The future belongs to crowds."

"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."

"I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it."

"California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

"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."

"He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows."

"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?"

"The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear."

"Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others."

"All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots."

"It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point."

"What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation."

"Facts are lonely things"

"Talent is more erotic when it's wasted."

"It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there."

"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."

"Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn."

"It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams"

"I'm not reclusive at all. Just private."

"Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live."

"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"

"You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself."

"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."

"I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble."

"Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets."

"A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable."

"These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after."

"American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous."

"Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?"

"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."

"Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can."

"The more things I threw away, the more I found."

"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."

"I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on."

"When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see."

"Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself."

"Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)"

"Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link."

"When he died he would not end. The world would end."

"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)"

"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."

"Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world."

"Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level."

"Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death."

"The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms."

"Sex finds us. sex sees through us. that's why it's so shattering. it strips us of appearances."_Eric Packer"

"Longing on a large scale makes history."

"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."

"The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities."