The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.

When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.

A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.