Breaking the fourth wall meant that Christian could move as the crow would fly. He could get back to Samantha and that strand of the plot by following a straight line.

I also remembered that the motel in Oak Ridge was in the present tense. Googie architecture, a heated pool, the history of the poolside recliner, that is all happening now, while the bedroom, the pile of discarded chicken eggs, the Dixie cup filled with lemon juice and honey, all of that was in the past.

Every character in every story is both limited by the structure of the language employed to tell the story and is the very fiction that transforms the language into the story. Without the fiction of a character or a story, without the emptiness that is at the center of all the accidents, all the burning coals or imposed styles, without an architect

The anchorman’s awkward smile, the way he would pause and raise his manicured left hand to his chin, this was how a television personality maintained the illusion of continuity. The story he was telling was one of systemic failure but what was communicated through these routine gestures was the exact opposite. Yes, ballot boxes had gone missing, ch

The problem was the lifting of the invisible barrier between the story and the reader. “I have to create a fictional space,” Christian says. “Can you do that? I mean if this is just a story then anything you do in it will just be another part of it, it will follow from what came before,”

Stop. I wanted her to stop, but Samantha removed her blonde hair from her perfectly smooth scalp. She’d been wearing a wig all along and I hadn’t known, and when she dropped this wig into the mud I shouted involuntarily.

“I thought I had depth, that there was my surface self and then my own real self inside, but look at this game. The surface and the underworld, day and night, both are on the same flat screen.”

“Think about those Road Runner cartoons where the Coyote runs off the side of a cliff and then remains suspended in midair. He’ll only fall if he looks down,” Dad said. And this was the secret. Life itself was a matter of refusing to look down or, if one couldn’t avoid looking, then the trick was to find a way to look without seeing. People could w

“Everything is in flux. Everything is equal, but if you ask people what they think or how they feel they say they’re just as stuck as they were before.”