The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
Hardship makes the world obscure.
He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.
Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
When he died he would not end. The world would end.
World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.
There is a world inside the world.
I never wanted to change the world.
The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.
Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.
There are no amateurs in the world of children.
Terror is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.
Music is dangerous in so many ways. It's the most dangerous thing in the world.
The world isn't going to be destroyed, but you don't feel safe anymore in your plane or train or office or auditorium.
When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.