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.

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

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.

A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.