People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

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

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

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

In fiction, I tend to write fairly realistic dialogue-not always, and it tends to vary

from book to book. But in many books, there is a colloquialism of address. The characters will speak in a quite idiosyncratic way sometimes.

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

I do not want to talk about it.

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.

We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now.

We need time to lose interest in things.

Every advance in knowledge and technique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a viral agent.

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

Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.

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

He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows.

The half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

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.

The difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.

Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.

Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of inter-communication is awe-inspiring.