Quotes from Tom McCarthy

We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events.

For anthropologists, even the exotic's not exotic, let alone the everyday.

To the anthropologist, as I explained before, it's generic episodes and phenomena that stand out as significant, not singular ones. To the anthropologist, there's no such thing as a singular episode, a singular phenomenon—only a set of variations on generic ones; the more generic, therefore, the more pure, the closer to an unvariegated or unscrambled archetype.

Everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything.

Master-meaning! Concealed revealment! I spent my twenties wanting to be Lévi-Strauss – which is ironic, since he spent most of his life wanting to be somebody or something else: a philosopher, say, or novelist, or poet.

Incomprehensible is no better than banal – it's just its flip-side.

Everything, as Peyman said, may be a fiction – but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all.

Satin Island, like all books, contains hundreds of borrowings, echoes, remixes and straight repetitions. To list them all would take up as much space as the text itself. The critical reader can entertain him- or herself tracking some of them down, if he or she is that way inclined.

Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past

But now there are no natives – or we're the natives.

Surplus matter. I'd forgotten all about that phrase, those classes -- even before the accident, I mean. After the accident I forgot everything. It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off. They fluttered back eventually -- but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones; I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important.

It's very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that's something that resonates for me.

It's about the possibility, or otherwise, of meaning in the world. And the possibility, or otherwise, of writing. And the possibility, or otherwise, of the resolution of everything into some coherent, cogent vision.

Ben Karlin is a friend of mine and was a writer on 'The Daily Show.' He's just put out a book and asked a bunch of writers from various disciplines to contribute. It was called 'Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me,' and of course I agreed, and then I actually had to sit down and write it. God, writing fiction is terrifying.