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 cl….

I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their m….

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair..

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..

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for..

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only meas….

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American..

In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I gue….

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California..

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly ….

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array….

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his….

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it h….

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….

When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare….

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity..

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

I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and….

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability"….

I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds o….

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..