Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

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.

The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.

Mystery is the wisdom of blockheads.

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

The most heartbreaking things are the ones that are sometimes the truest.

The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.

If your life turns out to be good and you have a tremendous amount of luck in your life, it's a good thing to turn around and make it work for others.

Anyone who tries to make a living as a painter knows you can't lounge about waiting for inspiration to hit; nothing motivates like keeping a roof over your head.

Work for black women has been an important and valued dimension of Afrocentric definitions of black motherhood.

Prayer joined to sacrifice constitutes the most powerful force in human history.

There are no accidents whatsoever in the universe.