“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.”

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.

I wasn’t aware I’d write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

I’ve been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

I guess when I’m frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I’ve tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.

I don’t think it’s always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn’t imply people aren’t multi-dimensional.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture’s prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

Experiments with the “as if” of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

I got a little tattoo on my face, I’ll never be able to work another real job so I consider that to be kinda forcing myself to stick to music.

God is utterly simple; for every composite being necessarily has a cause of its own composition, and so, since God is the first principle of all things, there can be no real composition whatever in God.

Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself.

I think all actors are on the constant search for a real challenge just to keep things interesting.

From aquaintances we conceal our real selves. To our friends we reveal our weaknesses.

We have the real self and the false self, there’s nothing wrong with them, and everyone has both of them.

In the frameworks of a peace agreement, a government under my leadership would agree to make real territorial concessions but will not compromise our security borders.

I don’t consider an actor a star if he’s paid $20 million and grimaces in front of the camera and has a stunt man stand in for him. They may be fine actors, but they’re not role models.