I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

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.

Positivity creates change.

We can free ourselves from the old stories that have reduced us & allow real love for ourselves to blossom.

They do say that socialism is the ideal philosophy-just as long as you have capitalists to pay for it.

I went back to my conversation with Siegfried that morning

If I could make millions of dollars being a softball player, I would quit acting in a second.

Ireland is a little country which raises all the great questions.

Just film what's there, trust what came before, one hour before, and make it easy.

Just as darkness is born of the absence of light, the shadow side of our collective experience is born of ignorance of the underlying truth of the unity of life.

My hair is so scary that if you saw it walking down the street, you'd cross to the other side. This humidity is not helping. It's just an excuse for my hair to let its frizz flag fly.

Money? I lost all taste for it.