He felt as sad as an uninhabited house

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

These days, I find, literary novelists are much more interested in plot and much less interested in plausibility, or in realism, than literary critics are.

(And to say that such books “transcend” the genres they’re in is bollocks, of the most bollocky kind. As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great, critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.)

—

“You’re being watched too, remember?”
“I wasn’t aware—”
“That some of the screens you’re looking at are looking at you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, they are.”

—

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity

I don’t want people to matter to me too much. Sometimes it hurts too much to think about them. Ones you love who don’t love you, ones who are dead or hate you, ones who you think about but never get to be with. I like people but when I get too close, it fucks me up and I can’t get things done.

The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.

Outside the stars were paled by the glaring lights of the city, and the large apartment was stale with his mother’s sorrow.

Idle reader: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine.

Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

HEATHER CHANDLER, Veronica in tow, hits the Country Club Kids with a salvo of false pleasantness, capped by a scowling smile.

Alone at a table in the Siberia of the cafeteria, MARTHA
finishes a forkful of chicken.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.

I like less naturalistic writing. Now the criticism you get is, ‘People don’t talk like that.’ My feeling is, ‘Hey man, I’m making a movie. Do people talk like they do in Casablanca? No.’ I like the older movies where you were allowed to have almost show-offy dialogue. You didn’t have to have everything be played real. I like something beyond real.