First coffee, then a bowel movement. Then the Muse joins me.

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.

The family in the West is finished... its origin was economic, not biological... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another's jagged edges.

Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.

I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.~

I think the Chinese will say the hell with you and pull their money out of the United States. That's the end of our wars.

Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions.