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

Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory.

Freud is finished, Einstein's next.

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.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.

Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?