There’s no remaking reality... Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.

He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.