To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive.

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or 'terror in a lonely place', the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind.

And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

I don't consider myself paranoid at all. I think I see things exactly as they are.

I am not particularly distressed by the state of fiction or the role of the writer. The more marginal, perhaps ultimately the more trenchant and observant and finally necessary he'll become.