I'm afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from, or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.

Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever.

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.