"He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world."

"Shit is universal no matter which language."

"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."

"The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever."

"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."

"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."

"Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before."

"Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational."

"Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory."

"Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain."

"We need time to lose interest in things."

"That which we fear to touch is often the very fabric of our salvation."

"It is all falling indelibly into the past."

"The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile."

"Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it."

"I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own distasters."

"A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."

"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."

"How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?"

"If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity."

"The term itself—my life—is a desperate overstatement."

"Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror."

"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."

"Why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?"

"He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight."

"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."

"As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive."

"Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun."

"I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change."

"Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent."

"Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs."

"Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)"

"World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained."

"You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen."

"Freud is finished, Einstein's next."

"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."

"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."

"Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant."

"Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant."

"Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping."

"There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us."

"...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity."

"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."

"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."

"Off-camera lives are unverifiable."

"Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission."

"Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope."

"You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness."

"Writing is freedom."

"The truth of the world is exhausting."