Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money.

When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.

You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark - spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.