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

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’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.

Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study.

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.

Children will listen to anything elders say to survive, and if you grew up without an elder telling you there was a god, what did your parents say to you?

I pride myself on average, not home runs.

However, there is something you should have. Something every Shadowhunter should have." "An obnoxious, arrogant attitude?" Simon said.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

Even if I thought he as perfect for her." She turned to face him. "What were we thinking?" "We weren't," he said. "We were in love.

Laughter is the best way To make somebody's heart beat

I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!