The task is not so much to solve problems as to propose questions.

Write about what you're afraid of.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.

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.

I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.

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.

Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.