“If the words of this book are misspelled, but accidentally spell other words correctly, and also accidentally fall into a grammatically coherent arrangement, where coherency is defined as whatever doesn't upset people, it means this book is legally another book, and not this book.”

“A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.”

“Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.”

“I recalled a sermon Burke had delivered months ago, when everything from the Jew hole was still safely abstract, wisdom I could enjoy in the unactionable pit of my mind. They will sniff at your legs, went Burke’s sermon. They will wish they were you. Beware the man on his knees, the display of weakness. But the sermon had not passed through the radio coherently that day; static cloaked the transmission. Every other word was weakness, as if the broadcast were looping by mistake. We were to fear weakness not in oneself, where it should be cherished, but in others. Or not fear it, but mistrust it. We too easily believe in the trouble of others, erect a machinery of caring. Look through the story at the teller’s need, was the caution. Share not your full story, went the warning.”

“Spelling a person's name is the first step toward killing him. It takes him apart and empties him of meaning. This is why God is afraid to have his name spelled.”

“There would be people answering to names they did not deserve. It would hurt to say their names. I would head upstairs and crack the seal on a jar of tomorrow's water, next week's water, next year's thin, sweet water--going as far ahead into the future as I could, until the water was barely there, clear and weak and airy-- and I would commence a fine, hard drinking spell, until this whole day, and the days before it, and then the people in those days and myself entirely, and my hard, dead name turned into a slick wire that pulled farther and farther away from me, slipping finally from view as I filled myself, as I took in enough water to make myself forever new to the small world that held me.”

“The simple answer is that I have changed my techniques in order to avoid the relentless sameness of my material, but I have probably only found new costumes, not new creatures entirely. In the past, if I wanted to sound a note on a piano (in prose), I didn’t just have to purchase and install the piano, I had to build it. But before I built it I had to grow the trees whose wood would yield the piano, and probably I had to create the soil and landscape through which those trees would burst. Then there was the problem of the fucking seeds. Where did they come from? I had to source them. With such mania I was either onto something or I completely misunderstood what a fiction writer was supposed to do. Simple things, even entirely undramatic ones, could not occur unless I created them from whole cloth. I was superstitious about taking anything for granted, but it also locked me into a kind of fanatical object fondling that could, on a bad day, preclude any exploration of the human (even though the process of trying to remake the world on the page is fairly, pathetically, human). This set of interests kept me away from what is usually called narrative. It wasn’t some ideological position, or an artistic stance, it was just one set of obsessions winning out over another. On the other hand, I think that I have always tried to create feeling, and then to pulse it into the reader with language. It’s very difficult to figure out how to do this. Storytelling is one way — conventional narrative or whatever you want to call it — but are there other methods worth exploring? The ground shifts, and I change my mind about what might work. How to create immense, unforgettable feeling from language? This ambition hasn’t really changed, it’s just that I want to cultivate new approaches, to try to circle in on a more vivid way to accomplish it.”