The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

The greatest sin is appearing naive or old-fashioned so that somebody can give you a sort of a very cool arch smile and devastate you with one extraordinarily crafted line that puts kind of a hole in your pretentious balloon.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.

When a solipsist dies ... everything goes with him.