Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.

I write my first draft by hand, at least for fiction. For non-fiction, I write happily on a computer, but for fiction I write by hand, because I'm trying to achieve a kind of thoughtless state, or an unconscious instinctive state. I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.