She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

I think it's easy to stop smoking; it's just hard not to commit a felony after you stop.

This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

Dostoevsky wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual *person*, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.