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.

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

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.

I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.

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.

Never underestimate the power of the State to act out its own massive fantasies.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

The future belongs to crowds.