There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't art.

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

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.