This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

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

That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.

The individual's right to pursue his own vision of the best ration of pleasure to pain: utterly sacrosanct.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived-the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad.

I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?