Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

It reaffirmed my long-held belief that education was the enemy of prejudice. These were men and women of science, and science had no room for racism.

A quote is a story, suspended in a sentence and treasured through time.

Rescue operation, " he says, breathless. "Saved Barbie from drowning.

I find so many things to fear and so few to hope.

Life isn't a race to win, it's a school for our higher education.

Potter is piqued with potter, joiner with joiner, beggar begrudges beggar, and singer singer.

I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk.

I'm just really confident sexually, and I think that sort of oozes out of my pores. It's just there. It's something I don't have to turn on.

You get to do things for people who will never pay you back and they say you never have had a perfect day until you've done something for someone who will never pay you back.

Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts.