Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.

I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.

If you can't write the next line, well, you're dead. The past doesn't matter.

The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.

After dinner or lunch or whatever it was -- with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what -- I said, "Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, let's give it up. Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. Let's go to the zoo. Let's look at animals. Let's drive down and look at the ocean. It's only 45 minutes. Let's play games in the arcades. Let's go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Let's have friends. Let's laugh. This kind of life like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us.

And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.

Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.