The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.

Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.

There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.

It occured to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

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 like the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words-not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like.

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 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.

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

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

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.