My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

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.

Through contemplation we become a reflection of the soul rather than the head. And, in the soul dwells a greater mind.

Spirituality is the poetry of our experience. Science is the gauge of our reality. Together, they create the essence of our humanity.

She didn't know that there was more of me, she'd have to learn to love all four of me.

Education brings about opportunity, and in turn inspiration.

I started out as a stand-up comedian. And that's what I'm most comfortable doing.

Someone's writing down your mistakes, someone's documenting your downfall.

If religion comprises rules you follow, faith is demonstrated by the actions you take.

The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.

The older you get, the more you fight for your own identity and start to live your own life.

During one or two summers, as well as part-time during the school year, I worked for a small Canadian company which developed electrical instruments for military planes.