I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

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.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

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?

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.