To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

When the ground starts moving, all bets are off.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

I ... have another cup of coffee with my mother. We get along very well, veterans of a guerrilla war we never understood.

Information is control.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.