What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
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.
I’ve got death inside me. It’s just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.
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.
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
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.
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.
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
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.
The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.
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.
I’m completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.
I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.
Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation.
California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
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.
Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.
He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled.
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.
I am the false character that follows the name around.
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.
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.
God made big people. And God made little people. But Colt made the .45 to even things up.
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.
Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. – Murray (WN 285)
As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.
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.
You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out” – Murray (WN 285).
You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.
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.
He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.
You need to know things the others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.
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.
Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.
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?
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.
When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.
I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it’s enough to make me proud to be an American.
When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.
The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.
That’s the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.
This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.
How many times do two people have to fuck before one of them deserves to die?” _Eric Packer
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
Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.
The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.
Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.
I slept for four years. I didn’t study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
There’s always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
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.
People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.
People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
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.