Footnote: 79) The anchor is gigantic and must weigh a hundred tons, and -- delightfully -- it really is anchor-shaped, i.e. the same shape as anchors in tattoos.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

A lot of writers tired of doing kind of hip, slick, funny, dark, exploding hypocrisy, underlining once again the point that life is a farce and we're all in it for ourselves and that the point of life is to amass as much money/fame/sexual gratification, you know, whatever your personal thing is, and that everything else is just glitter or PR image - that we're tired of sort of doing that stuff over and over again.

...morning is the soul's night.

These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.

The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."

He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.