You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are.

Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We have minutes to live.

Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing

The world is shrinking into a kind of technological funnel. I think people are drawn into their technological devices, and this becomes a kind of subjective universe, into which much of the rest of the world simply does not enter.