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

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified - which is sometimes useful.

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.