When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.