The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

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.

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.

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.

Even the broken will fight

Unlike Churchill I have no plans to shape history. . . . Socrates gave advice - and they poisoned him.

ZIGZAG, v.t. To move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden.

Don't look for excuses to lose. Look for excuses to win.

...small too even the longest fame thereafter, which is itself subject to a succession of little men who quickly die, and have no knowledge of themselves, let alone of those long dead.

You can't really move forward if you don't heal the past and identify and address the fact that you had a problem and in some cases still have issues. That has to be dealt with.

I'm clearly not a writer, but I'm always a fan of them.

I live in Paris but I feel I am a daughter of Europe.

Every church is flawed. Still, you'd better learn to love it since it's the only group Jesus said he's taking to Heaven.

...Really, there is no greater sin than cowardice; cowards are never saved - that is sure. I can stand everything else but not that.