It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

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.