It's easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it.

I think everybody must be aware that this society is a whole lot shakier now than it was before the war. I was trying to examine, in 'Dog Soldiers,' the process of that blow falling on America.

My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn’t optimism.

Like many visitors, they had been unnerved by the inimitable creepiness of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimly gaudy, theopathical Turkish bathhouse where their childhood saints glared like demented spooks from every moldering wall.

One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death.

The mixtures of shells and light makes you confused and unhappy. One side employing the force of he other merging. You’re one of those people who hears the sun come up.

See, it’s all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else’s movie starts.

Sleeping and waking, the notion of being lost, of having wandered out of the right life, kept turning up in different guises. She imagined mirrors in which she could not find herself.

What is worst about America was acted out. What is best in America doesn’t export.

It’s all about letting the story take over.