Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

Because like all whores you value propriety. You are creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless.

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.

It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.