"Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man."

"Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children."

"Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat, I tell myself. Define time, define space."

"Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy."

"We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identicalstructures."

"Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do."

"How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process."

"It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can't be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it's true."

"Fear is intense self-awareness."

"Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb?"

"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."

"When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see."

"People get bitten. But I won't.' I found myself saying, 'You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite you and you will die."

"The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings."

"The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: 'We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!' This outburst struck the passengers as an all but total breakdown of authority, competence and command presence and it brought on a round of fresh and desperate wailing."

"Hardship makes the world obscure."

"A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true."

"Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird."

"All that incoherence. Selection, election, option, alternative. All behind him now. Codes and formats. Courses of action. Values, bias, predilection. Choice is a subtle form of disease."

"The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things."

"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."

"Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam."

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

"When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."

"Secrets are an exalted state, almost a dream state. They're a way of arresting motion, stopping the world so we can see ourselves in it."

"The future belongs to crowds."

"A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it."

"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."