Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.

Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.

But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

A general rule: if enough people predict something, it won't happen.

The catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game. [. . .] Each one of these fantasies represents an arraignment of the finite, an attempt to dismantle the formal structure of time and space which the universe wraps around us at the moment we first achieve consciousness.

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists.