One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness - the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature. ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells.

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.

Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.