Dancing at the Edge of the World

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke.

The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).

That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag.

he novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story.

he trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

t is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.

Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being.