Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.

I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

reach isn’t describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it’s simultaneous.