I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.