You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.