“A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.”

“It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.”

“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. ”

“Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes... I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now... that if it were possible to life this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth... and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables--all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath--how seedlings would sprout and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills...”

“A stydy today of the products of the animated cartoon industry of the twenties, thirties and forties would yield the following theology: 1. People are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living. 4. The flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart are destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.”

“It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.”

“...if justice cannot be made to operate under the worst possible conditions of social hysteria, what does it matter how it operates at other times?”