For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.

You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it's needed ... You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry.

There's a certain kind of neurological makeup that goes along with being a writer, and having been in the room with a few other writers at the same time, it's rather wearing to be around. And it does - there is a kind of hypervigilance about it. Unfortunately it's got disadvantages. If you turn that hypervigilance on yourself and, for instance, whether or not you have a pimple on the end of your nose, it can get really depressing.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.

Mediocrity is contextual.

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.