“I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing – a kind of night vision.”

Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

Maybe that’s the way I’m private – I respect the privacy of “my” characters? Anyway, we’re getting close to the whole “relatability” and “likability” thing.

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. “Ari” appears on the edge of this book a couple of times – but on the edge, she’s never in it, even if she’s a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I don’t think “I’m going to publish this as fiction” but I think “I’m going to tell this story to a friend” and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it’s already happened.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

Maybe now if you’re not an exhibitionist you’re private. Or maybe it’s just that for a lot of people – sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways – there’s no division between the art object and what surrounds it.

I like to think – knowing that it’s an enabling fiction – of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn’t the only measure of value.

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature’s ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.

The thing that makes me want to make pictures now is just looking without many prejudices. The stuff right under your eyes is the most wonderful universe

There are very few people who have committed more to the pro-life discourse than Rob has. He’s spent time in jail. He has really lived it.

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.

If you desire the path of sincerity, develop a love for obscurity. Flee from the clatter and clinks of fame.

On June 10, the worst storm in the series swept across the middle of the Indian Ocean and Wild Eyes was directly in its path.

The winds were blowing from west to east, pushing Abby’s boat toward the rocks as Abby struggled with the autopilots below.

On October 19, 2009, my sixteenth birthday, Wild Eyes officially became mine! Now it was really happening.

Man is not intended to see through the eyes of another, hear through another’s ears nor comprehend with another’s brain.