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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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?"

"People will always make comparisons."

"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."

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

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

"It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain."

"I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism."

"Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there."

"America was and is the immigrant's dream."

"There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President."

"I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood."

"I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language."

"The modern meaning of life's end-when does it end? How does it end? How should it end? What is the value of life? How do we measure it?"

"I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore."

"When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery."

"Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted."

"For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking."

"I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence."

"There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down."

"There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it."

"I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation."

"I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts."

"Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail."

"People who are powerless make an open theater of violence."

"Hardship makes the world obscure."

"The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence."

"The future belongs to crowds."

"I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church. I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it."