California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.