"You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness."

"Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing."

"It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder."

"Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?"

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

"I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory."

"This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track."

"If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension of the final size of things."

"Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant."

"Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls."

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

"Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip."

"Everybody wants to own the end of the world."

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

"Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear."

"Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you."

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

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

"I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues."

"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."

"As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive."

"No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die."

"There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?"

"Only absences were fully shared."

"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."

"God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up."

"All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot."

"How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blazed brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living.Nothing fits the body so well as water."

"I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it."

"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."

"Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain."

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

"How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?"

"It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is-an intense form of thought."

"That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease."

"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."

"When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear."

"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 am the false character that follows the name around."

"Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure."

"When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying."

"Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level."

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

"Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed my mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in upper rows."

"The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it."

"I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be 'only human,' subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief."