Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.

There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

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 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 had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.