You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

The bottom line for me is that life is short and art is long.

He was a father. That's what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

The way I understood purgatory - and maybe you've got a different version - but in Chicago in the '70s, the idea was it was like detention. You had screwed up and you go over there in purgatory and you sit there until the end of days and then we'll decide. You'd made your mistake, and you were in prison, and it's not terrible and it's not great, and you feel a little crappy because you were not in the presence of God.