Essayists From The United States

"He'd once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it."

"The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe." "As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe...Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes."

"When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear."

"Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire."

"When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying."

"Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species."

"We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.”"

"It was important for him to believe that he'd spent his life among people who kept missing the point."

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

"The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true."

"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream."

"He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation."

"To become a crowd is to keep out death."

"I heard a noise, faint, monotonous, white."

"No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die."

"Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping."

"Who will die first?"

"I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread."

"I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it."

"Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid."

"All plots tend to move deathwards. This is the nature of plots."

"Evil is movement towards void."

"I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version."

"If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely."

"I had centered myself, learning of the existence of an interior motion, a shift in the levels from isolation to solitude to wordlessness to immobility. When Opel occupied that center I became the thing that swirled."

"In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices."

"I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing."

"California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom."

"I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read...I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from."

"Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S. Why not use it?"

"The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now."

"I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become."

"I think what'll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we'll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words, we'll get together with them beforehand and there'll be an agreement that if the issue can't be settled, whatever the issue might be, then let's make sure we keep our war as relatively clean as possible."

"I think fiction rescues history from its confusions."

"I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist."

"Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It's the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won't go away. The thing is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it's still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it's relatively acceptable."

"Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror."

"War is the ultimate realization of modern technology."

"Uncle Sam's other province."

"They darted down and rose up like a wave Or buzzed impetuously as before; One would have thought the corpse was held a slave To living by the life it bore!"

"What is the flesh and blood compounded of But a few moments in the life of time? This prowling of the cells, litigious love, Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime."

"Now remember courage, go to the door, Open it and see whether coiled on the bed Or cringing by the wall, a savage beast Maybe with golden hair, with deep eyes Like a bearded spider on a sunlit floor Will snarl—and man can never be alone."

"I think the concept of the 2suit is perfect. But I also think just the philosophy of thinking, thinking beyond normal into creating a suit for two people is wonderful."

"She plays like a child and creates like a genius."

"Ready to test that law [physics] and go where no man and woman have gone before is Vanna Bonta."

"She totally enchanted us. Her presence was kind and is still greatly missed."

"Joy and Sorrow have as source the very soul who planned their course."

"Vanna's 2Suit is just one small step toward humankind colonizing the universe."

"Now this is a writer."

"If you were the sky, I would unfurl myself in you, as a rainbow of colors yet unseen. I would become oceans of stars in your night."