I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

Worship your body, beauty, and sexual allure and you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.