This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.

If you feel you have a strong constituency among the young, you can really die happy, because the great unanswered question, the only valid value judgment is whether you're going to last, and that tells you that you are, for a bit at least.

Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back.

Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.

Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover. Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time.

He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.