But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.

Every artist has limits. No one can do everything. It's impossible.

I've always been passionately in love with movies, to such a degree that even as a young person of about nineteen or twenty I thought maybe I would try to become a film director. The reason I didn't do it was because I felt I didn't have the right personality. At that time in my life, I was mortally shy.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.