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.

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.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

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.

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.

Consciousness is in this present moment, the awareness with every cell in your body the direct and experience of love.

It is impossible for a man to outpace his shadow.

I make NO apologies for my creativity.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

If I upset some notions and went against established rules, that wasn't part of what I wanted to do. It wasn't my goal.

I was taken in by what might be called the Hard Times version of the Communists' advertising or recruiting technique.

Please don't kill me!

Prejudice is a form of untruthfulness, and untruthfulness is an insidious form of injustice.

You cannot become a master until you actually take the leap, do the work, make several thousand mistakes, and live to tell about it.