The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.

I felt, as I became a later and later bloomer, alienated not just from my own recalcitrant glabrous little body but in a way from the whole elemental exterior I'd come to see as my co-conspirator.

I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose - this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.