A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past.

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

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.

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.