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.

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.

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.

How would you rather die?" she snapped. "Hiding under your bed or riding Thunder Mountain?

The men who have done the most for God in this world have been early on their knees.

If you write songs you have an idea how they're going to sound.

Have I seen The Commitments? I was obsessed with that movie. I just watched it again about two weeks ago.

There's always been anger in the making of music or literature or dance.

I had to learn chord shapes... I bought books with chord charts. I used to listen to all kinds of pop music.

Back in my day, we called it rock 'n' roll, but then we always reminded listeners that it was no big deal if they didn't like it.

Hiphop hasn't had stages of growth through its 30 years of existence.

It is no coincidence that some of America's most lethargic industries-steel, footwear, rubber, textiles-are also among the most heavily protected.

Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.