Status Updates From A Million Windows

Even an undiscerning reader would have understood by now that our sort of writer avoids the use of dialogue or so-called direct speech in his fiction because it gives to text the appearance of a fimscript or a playscript.

For me, what the word space denotes it hardly different from what is denoted by the word mind, and whenever I perform one or another exercises mentioned earlier which is to say whenever I read with due attention some or another passage of what I call true fiction or considered narration then I become aware that the space between each sentence and its subject-matter may well reach endlessly in directions unknown to me

No one in this wing owns to being poet. Several may have written one on more poems, but whether or not any such occasional poet has sought publication, no published poem can be traced back to these dusty corridors and mostly silent rooms.

In a work of fiction intended to provide its readers with the sort of experience available to watchers of film a young male character might well be reported as seeing in his mind image after image of himself and a young female character while he and she travelled in the picture bus from their suburb to a neighbouring suburb while they sat together in the Plaza or the Paramount and while they later travelled homeward

The narrators who postured in front of their readers and who wondered aloud, as it were, what fates to assign to various characters, were deriving enjoyment, so I now believe, from what they supposed was the dispelling of an illusion held by most, if not all, of their readers.

One of the many devices employed by writers of fiction is the use of the present tense. I myself have written several works of fiction in the present tense. Soon after I had read the autobiography in which distant windows are likened to spots of golden oil, I began yet another of the drafts that I had already began of a work of fiction that I had for long had in mind. The draft then began was in the present tense.

Didn't come together for me but good writing.

I am never quite sure what Murnane is getting at (his other two books I have read left me confused) but in this one, his language is beautiful and there is a nice narrative flow. I am quite liking it.