Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline.

Your purpose when driving is not to arrive at your destination safely or quickly. Your purpose when driving is...to impress your personality on the road.

So I am lonely, but not alone, like everybody else.

When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.

If you want to know the real meaning of pornography, it is the utter dissociation of love and sex, the banishment of love from the sexual arena.

I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it.

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards.