The second, you have to live with for a while, before you can hear where it wants you to go. But for that, you need time and attention and effort, resources that are deeply endangered, in the era when all music is available to anyone from anywhere all the time.

Even the most interesting of them rarely survived repeated listening. I wanted a kind of music that could concentrate me, that could teach me how to concentrate. Music that would keep getting richer and deeper, the more I listened.

Fiction is a spreading, polysemous, relational network that captures the way that we and our worlds create each other.

To me, that sense of complete commensurability between form and content at the level of the individual sentence is really what writing is all about.

And I’m a completely compulsive sentence-level rewriter.

“The first rule of any classroom,” he reminds himself the first day in prison. “Never resort to irony.”

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it’s not corrupted. It’s a threat to the GNP, to the gene engineer. It’s an invisible, sedate, almost inert process. Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

The currency he was speaking of is very much the care and tending of individual salvation.

He said, „Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude.“