Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration.

Write about what you're afraid of.

The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love...And you can never touch a girl in the same way more than once, twice, or another number of times however much you may wish to hold, wrap, or otherwise fix her hand, or look, or some other quality, or incident, known to you previously.

Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. Theyve been a laboratory for everybody.

The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.