I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

You can pretty much trace when the big individual indebtedness kicked in, and it was when the credit card became generally available.

When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.

War is what happens when language fails.

Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.