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When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not...more

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

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Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? I...more

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It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel i...more

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I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

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Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

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The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly ...more

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It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, ...more

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It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significa...more

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I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, so...more

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If you could stretch a given minute, what would you find between its unstuck components? Probably some kind of astral madness. A bleak comprehension o...more

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Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when y...more

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As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genui...more

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Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-l...more

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This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of g...more