
Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

Hardship makes the world obscure.

America was and is the immigrant's dream.

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction, but in a very general way, as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

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

I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.

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

I've always liked being relatively obscure. I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.

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