Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.