What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you just to live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm telling you to live in it. Try and get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.

I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.