America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy.

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the sombre renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

I see contemporary violence as a kind of sardonic response to the promise of consumer fulfilment in America.

There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended.