Laser technology has fulfilled our people’s ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they’re no longer the works that preceded the novel.

The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.

The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,” I said, meaninglessly.

I’ve been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

How much easier it would be if when you played them slowly in reverse the lyrics really did, as some hysterical parents feared, reveal satanic messages; if there were a backmasked secret order, however dark, instead of rage at emptiness.

I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it’s imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it’s an antidote to despair.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.