Quotes from T. C. Boyle

I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.

I do not want to repeat myself. I want to reach for something I've never attained. This is the excitement of art.

What is your identity, and how do you know who you are if you don't have language?

I can't fathom writers married to writers and musicians married to musicians. There's your enemy in bed beside you.

This is the beauty of fiction. We may not like these characters, but we inhabit them.

Life is tragic and absurd, and none of it has any purpose at all.

The compulsively readable events of my life occurred mainly in infancy, and it's been pretty humdrum ever since.

I tell jokes, and I have fun, but I tend to worry about everybody and everything throughout the entire world.

The beauty of American law is you cannot slander anybody who is dead. This is not true in all countries.

I'm just kind of fascinated by how we can deny that we are animals and what our impact on the other animals is like, and how quixotic we can be in trying to assess what we've done in trying to correct it.

As humans, we all want our own island. Of course, the truth is, we're never going to get it.

I really like the power of stopping the laughter and turning it to horror.

I don't care if the audience is 600 Saul Bellows; I'm going to knock them dead with a comedy routine. I'm out there as a missionary for literature because, if people laugh and enjoy themselves, they might actually do something as bizarre as reading the book.

I hope to stay light on my feet, to work in many modes, to seek inspiration always, and avoid the fatal. But, as we all know, it is the price of life to burn out, both metaphorically and literally.

Now that we all live in a bad '70s sci-fi movie, I am made to understand the tyranny of the machines every minute of every day.

I am a worrier. I worry about the state of our country, of the world, of our species. Every day seems to deliver a new nail to hammer into our collective coffin.

I'm not looking ahead joyfully to the rest of my life or the future of the human race. I've always written about man as an animal species among other animals, competing for limited resources. Our population is exploding. Our environment is dying. Science has debunked God.

In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.

Every story is organic, and every story finds its own ending.

This is why fiction is an art, and life is not - how much more affecting is the lie than the truth.

Books are up against TV and movies and video games and a multimedia society that is so busy that people don't have contemplative time any more. I worry deeply about this. In fact, I worry about everything all the time. I used to be a punk. All I wanted to do was tear everything down, and that was so much easier.