The public is totally illiterate in America. It can't read at all. It's absolutely insensitive to words.

Most journalists are broken down alcoholics.

Feeling is taboo, especially in New York. I read in some little magazine the other day that The New Yorker and The New York Times were sclerotic, meaning, "completely turned to rock." The critics here are that way.

There's the world of the newspapers. They believe that what is happening is happening, which is so naïve. Because they're the first to turn on that.

There's really nothing wrong with sentimentality... Nothing I wrote is sentimental.

As always, I wonder if I'll get through the winter. Then when winter is over, I wonder about the summer. But that's because the system decided which author shall be commercially successful. As I said, the most vicious of them all is The New York Times, because it pretends to be literary and impartial, and it's really this opinionated, myopic, stupid giant of incompetence.

The world is telling you through The New York Times and The New York Review of Books "You must shut up. You must never appear again. Because you are not relevant to us." So you have to fight their attempt to destroy you, fight to continue feeling.