Hold'em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.

When you make a bet, you're saying something.

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients.