I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

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.

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.

Smartass Disciple: I've been searching for so long.I still can't find the truth.Master of Stupidity: Until you've lost and felt desperate, you won't be found.

Day after day, more and more medications are prescribed for depression and addiction, assuming that these things run in our blood, when really they run in our patterns of awareness.

But Marchent, most journalists can’t be trusted. You do know that, don’t you?

I love doing comedy. One of my favorite things in the world is to do Parks and Recreation; a big fun character.

It looks to me, looking out the hatch, that we are venting something. We are venting something out into the - into space.

Liability does apply with respect to the amount of the oil spill.

I liked Camille Paglia. I liked her even better when I heard her talk.

Most beginners are too anxious for results. Real progress takes place over a long period of time.

Its hardly a radical idea to suggest that regulators and legislators understand the law now, is it?

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us is convertible by intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes.