There were icons of the Magdalen on the walls and paintings in the Western manner, all kitsch, trash. Mary M., Lucas thought, half hypnotized by the chanting in the room beside him; Mary Moe, Jane Doe, the girl from Migdal in Galilee turned hooker in...
The border between the State of Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip had always reminded him of the line between Tijuana and greater San Diego. There, too, ragged men the color of earth waited with the mystical patience of the very poor on the pleasure...
What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn't export.
It's all about letting the story take over.
The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.
It's easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it.
I'm not much crazier than anybody else, but I'm not much saner.
It's creepy, knowing someone might be watching me. Why do they need that?
But Moby-Dick is the explanation of America. It’s not just a novel. It is a book of prophecy. It is the book. It is the book of America.
The scene is a writer's study, shabby, drafty but tax-deductible. The writer is reading the last hundred pages of his work in progress. For the past fifty or so, a kind of slow terror has been rising in his breast. All these pages had seemed necessar...
Life is a means of extracting fiction.
At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on.
I think everybody must be aware that this society is a whole lot shakier now than it was before the war. I was trying to examine, in 'Dog Soldiers,' the process of that blow falling on America.
Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?
