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

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.

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.

Those are the two best words in English, 'Bidding' and 'war'.

A chief petty officer taught me shorthand, which got me promoted to yeoman first class.

Italians have no sense of the dramatic.

The real doubt is the doubt that doubts that it doubts.

The leaves of the trees are like the thoughts of the men: Some are bright, some dark; some fresh, some rotten; some healthy, some diseased.

Every duty is a charge, but the charge of oneself is the root of all others.

The scourge of life, and death's extreme disgrace, The smoke of hell,--that monster called Paine.

It is to beoted that when any part of this paper appears dull there is a design in it.

Death is profoundly meaningful. Discovering what it is in itself we will know the secret of life.

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.