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

Was she naked?" Lasher said. "To the waist," Cotsakis said. "From which direction?" Lasher said.

Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.

Maybe when we die, the first thing we'll say is 'I know this feeling. I was here before'.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.