"I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne."

"I like simple men and complicated women."

"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."

"Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work."

"What you see is not what wee se. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years."

"A Catholic is raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and if he doesn't live his life in a certain way, this death is an introduction to an eternity of pain."

"He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled."

"You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself."

"That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stories of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century--the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports."

"If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely."

"The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light-the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter's hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn't expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert."

"In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins."

"Then they're always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can't buy what they're selling, you're a zero in the system."

"You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out' - Murray (WN 285)."

"May the days be aimless. Do not advance action according to a plan."

"Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

"I like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like."

"The vast and terrible depth.'Of course, he said.'The inexhaustibility.'I understand.'The whole huge nameless thing.'Yes, absolutely.'The massive darkness.'Certainly, certainly.'The whole terrible endless hugeness.'I know exactly what you mean."

"I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds."

"She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski."

"There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live."

"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream."

"Technology is crucial to civilization why? Because it helps us make our fate. We don't need God or miracles or the flight of the bumble bee. But it is also crouched and undecidable. It can go either way."

"The language of my books has shaped me as a man."

"What was the barn like before it was photographed?' he said. 'What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now."

"What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation."

"I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else."

"It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know."

"I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American."

"Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies."

"Everything was on television last night."

"People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power."

"I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?"

"He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows."

"People will always make comparisons."

"It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture."

"I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs."

"One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language."

"In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic."

"Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational."

"Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs."

"Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation."

"Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death."

"California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

"The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation."

"The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever."

"There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats."

"I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version."

"When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards. But when I think of my work out in the world, written and published, I like to imagine it's being read by some stranger somewhere who doesn't have anyone around him to talk to about books and writing-maybe a would-be writer, maybe a little lonely, who depends on a certain kind of writing to make him feel more comfortable in the world."

"American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous."