“Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV).”

“That's the great truth of failed relationships, the narrative and the absence of narrative. Each time you tell the story, it makes less sense, the smooth arcs disintegrate into a series of jagged peaks. As you stand on one of its precipices, you can no longer see the way forward. How did you traverse from one point to another? How did you make the journey safely?”

“Art is the outward integration inspired by the artist's inner disintegration.”

“First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.”

“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.”

“To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.”