Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

We need time to lose interest in things.

Certainly I've never tried to imagine what the future will hold. It's a hopeless endeavor to try to do such a thing.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.