"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"Who will die first?"

"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."

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

"Evil is movement towards void."

"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."

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

"War is the ultimate realization of modern technology."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"I think fiction rescues history from its confusions."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Be indigestible, hard, ungiving. so that, living within, you beget, self-out-of-self, selfless, that pearl-of-great-price."

"For one moment seek a lesser beauty and a lesser grace, but you will find no peace in the end save in her presence."

"I knew all the poets-their poems-when I was quite young. (Who were your favorites?) G.P.: I loved Robinson Jeffers. I loved Auden, I loved H.D."

"We don't have to know, only to be: let go the jumble of worn words, reason and vanity."

"The reason is: rats leave the sinking ship but we... we... didn't leave, so the ship didn't sink, and that's madness, Lear's song that's Touchstone's forest jest, that's swan of Avon logic."

"Though such the darkness of my soul, Not such the calmness there; But waves of guilt tumultuous roll 'Midst billows of despair."

"Tell me thou all pervading mind, When I this life forsake, Must ev'ry tender tie unbind, Each sweet connection break?"

"There give thy griefs full vent to flow O'er the unconscious dead, With no spectator to thy woe But my attendant shade."

"How shall I leave thee, oh! my love, And blooming progeny? If I without thee mount above, 'Twill be no heav'n to me."

"Come Grief, and sing a solemn dirge Beneath this midnight shade; From central darkness now emerge, And tread the lonely glade."

"Naturally I don't believe books and I don't believe teachers, but I do believe-it's important for me to believe you [Gene]. Christ, I've got to believe you, at least. I know you better than anybody."

"You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with 'personality,' and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas."

"Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men."

"Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a war you've got to be in a hurry. Don't you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren't ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes. . . I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive."

"All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way-if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy."

"It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart."

"Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over. People will get their respect for you from that-partly from that, don't get me wrong-but if you can say that you were up front where there was some real shooting going on, then that will mean a whole lot to you in years to come."

"He [Finny] had never been jealous of me for a second. Now I knew that there never was and never could have been any rivalry between us. I was not of the same quality as he."

"He possessed an extra vigor, a heightened confidence in himself, a serene capacity for affection which saved him. Nothing as he was growing up at home, nothing at Devon, nothing even about the war had broken his harmonious and natural unity. So at last I had."

"I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas."

"Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence."

"Earth gravity and a line of horizon is how we, as Earth humans, are accustomed to gauging spatial orientation."

"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."