How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary. See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

It's probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it.

It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me?

The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.

A lot of writers tired of doing kind of hip, slick, funny, dark, exploding hypocrisy, underlining once again the point that life is a farce and we're all in it for ourselves and that the point of life is to amass as much money/fame/sexual gratification, you know, whatever your personal thing is, and that everything else is just glitter or PR image - that we're tired of sort of doing that stuff over and over again.

If you worship power, you will feel weak and afraid, needing ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.