“Nothing is real until you put it in the VCR.”

“A lifetime's experience urges me to utter a warning cry: do anything else, take someone's golden retriever for a walk, run away with a saxophone player. Perhaps what's wrong with being a writer is that one can't even say 'good luck'--luck plays no part in the writing of a novel. No happy accidents as with the paint pot or chisel. I don't think you can say anything, really. I've always wanted to juggle and ride a unicycle, but I dare say if I ever asked the advice of an acrobat he would say, 'All you do is get on and start pedaling'.”

“After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised”

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. ”

“Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it's we women who control magic.”

“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status -- all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).”

“The Chinese enjoyed the grim spectacle of death, Jim had decided, as a way of reminding themselves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking that the world was anything else.”