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.
The future belongs to crowds.
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.
California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.
He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.
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?
The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.
Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.
All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point.
What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.
Facts are lonely things
Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.
It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.
What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.
Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.
It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams
I'm not reclusive at all. Just private.
Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.
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
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 people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.
I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.
Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.
A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.
These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?
He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.
Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.
The more things I threw away, the more I found.
People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.
I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.
When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.
Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.
 )
Sometimes a thing that's hard is hard because you're doing it wrong. (Point Omega)
Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.
When he died he would not end. The world would end.
 )
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)
It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.
Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.
The instant he knew he loved her, she slipped down his body and out of his arms.
Sex finds us. sex sees through us. that's why it's so shattering. it strips us of appearances."_Eric Packer
Longing on a large scale makes history.
Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.
The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.
Shit is universal no matter which language.
The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.
For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.
Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, 'I know this feeling. I was here before.
Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.
Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.
Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.
We need time to lose interest in things.
That which we fear to touch is often the very fabric of our salvation.
It is all falling indelibly into the past.
The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.
Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it.
I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own distasters.
A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.
The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.
How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement?
If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.
The term itself—my life—is a desperate overstatement.
Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.
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.
Why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?
He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.
Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes.
As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.
Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.
I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.
Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.
Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.
 )
Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)
World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.
You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.
Freud is finished, Einstein's next.
He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.
The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.
Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.
Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.
Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.
There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.
...Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.
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.
Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.
Off-camera lives are unverifiable.
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.
You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.
Writing is freedom.
The truth of the world is exhausting.
