Cormac McCarthy

": —Russell said so."

"Rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. All the rest is grief."

"Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished."

"The arrival of language was like the invasion of a parasitic system. Co-opting those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. The most susceptible to appropriation."

"Your life is set upon you like a dog."

"If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose."

"The days are long but the years are short."

"You shouldn't worry about what people think of you because they don't do it that often."

"My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow."

"Schopenhauer says somewhere that if the entire universe should vanish the only thing left would be music."

"If the world has a mind then it's all worse than we thought."

"As long as you are breathing you can always be more scared."

"I thought about David Bohm. He wrote a really good book on quantum mechanics — largely because Einstein had half convinced him that the theory was faulty. He wanted to get down his thoughts on paper. By the time he'd finished the book he didn't believe in the theory."

"A group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of the creator’s brain not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike."

"Do you believe in an afterlife?"

": —I dont believe in this one."

": —Do you?"

": —I’ve no idea. It strikes me as extremely unlikely. But again the probability is not zero."

"How do you know you shouldnt? The core question is not how you do math but how does the unconscious do it. How is it that it’s demonstrably better at it than you are? You work on a problem and then you put it away for a while. But it doesnt go away. It reappears at lunch. Or while you’re taking a shower. It says: Take a look at this. What do you think? Then you wonderwhy the shower is cold. Or the soup. Is this doing math? I’m afraid it is. How is it doing it? We dont know. I’ve posed the question to some pretty good"

": —I’m not sure I see how that would work."

": —Neither does anybody else. Sometimes you get a clear sense that doing math is largely just feeding data into the substation and waiting to see what comes out. I’m not even sure that it’s all that wise to commit things to memory."

"Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking."