Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it.

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

Time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find... The future becomes insistent.

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.