“He liked the fact that the cars were indistinguishable from each other. He wanted such a car because he thought it was a platonic replica, weightless for all its size, less an object than an idea. But he knew this wasn't true. This was something he said for effect and he didn't believe it for an instant. He believed it for an instant but only just. He wanted the car because it was not only oversized but aggressively and contemptuously so, metastasizingly so, a tremendous mutant thing that stood astride every argument against it.”

“He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays--all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality...”

“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.”Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?“The only laws that matter are laws of thought.”His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white.“The rest is devil worship," he said.”

“she knows what he means, that they don’t have to touch. the same thing that’s happening to him is happening to her. she doesn’t need to crawl under the table ans suck his dick. too tire to interest either one of them. the flow is strong between them. the emotional tone. let it express itself. he sees her in her wallow and feel his pelvic muscles begin to quiver. he say, tell me to stop and i’ll stop. but he doesn’t wait for her to reply. there isn’t time. the tails of his sperm cells are lashing already. she is his sweetheart and lover and slut undying. he doesn’t have to do the unspeakable thing he wants to do. he only has to speak it. because they’re beyond every model of established behavior. he only wants to say the words.” _Eric Packer”

“I am a bad actor.""Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make himself into.""I'm all idea today.""I definitely don't see it.""I'm playing the idea of death. Look closely," he said.”

“He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.”

“Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be.”