Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.

I guess that as life is speeded up and our capacity for concentration is being nibbled away at by all the obvious things, that leads us actually to be more susceptible to boredom.

I'd have no rituals, but I'm a person of compulsive habit. That's just some awful residue of a ritual. And one of the reasons for that is my living this life, which is otherwise so free of obligations. It's not at all unusual for anybody who's independently employed to crave a way of living whereby they create the structures without which their lives would otherwise start slopping around all over the place.

Mike Pence came out and said this was a courtesy call, then Donald Trump a few hours later went on Twitter, as is his wont, and essentially linked the call to Taiwan with a whole series of things he doesn't like about Chinese economic and foreign policies and implied that the U.S. views of the status of Taiwan are now up for negotiation, that he wants them to be part of a broader negotiation with China about a whole series of economic and foreign policy issues. So, we just don't really know what exactly they're planing to do with this.

There's something about New York. You can get a nice feeling of belonging as a writer here. It's probably the best city on Earth like that. I miss the wisecracking of New York.

If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff

For so long I didn't have any kind of readership at all - I'd get published, but not read - the idea of writing for an audience is so anathema to me, it's never bothered me.