One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

Like father like son, like mother like daughter!

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.

I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

I used to want to be a backup singer. Not a lead singer, because I really can't sing.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.