So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer.

The paradox is that no love can prove so intense as the love of two narcissists for each other.

The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

Dying can't be all that difficult-up to now everyone has managed to do it.

We are in love with the word. We are proud of it. The word precedes the formation of the state. The word comes to us from every avatar of early human existence. As writers, we are obliged more than others to keep our lives attached to the primitive power of the word. From India, out of the Vedas, we still hear: On the spoken word, all the gods depend, all beasts and men; in the world live all creatures...The word is the name of the divine world.

Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men.