First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there's a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger.

He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

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

Before pop art, there was such a thing as bad taste. Now there's kitsch, schlock, camp, and porn.