We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.