The Less Important You Are In An

The Dead Have A Presence.

A Person Rises On A Word And Falls On A Syllable.

What We Are Reluctant To Touch Often Seems The Very Fabric Of Our Salvation.

I Think It's Only In A Crisis That Americans See Other People. It Has To Be An American Crisis, Of Course. If Two Countries Fight That Do Not Supply The Americans With Some Precious Commodity, Then The Education Of The Public Does Not Take Place. But When The Dictator Falls, When The Oil Is Threatened, Then You Turn On The Television And They Tell You Where The Country Is, What The Language Is, How To Pronounce The Names Of The Leaders, What The Religion Is All About, And Maybe You Can Cut Out Recipes In The Newspaper Of Persian Dishes.

For Me, Wellbehaved Books With Neat Plots And Worked-out Endings Seem Somewhat Quaint In The Face Of The Largely Incoherent Reality Of Modern Life; And Then Again Fiction, At Least As I Write It And Think Of It, Is A Kind Of Religious Meditation In Which Language Is The Final Enlightenment, And It Is Language, In Its Beauty, Its Ambiguity And Its Shifting Textures, That Drives My Work.