Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.

But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going. Sometimes I even go to Fun parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don't care as long as they're insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone's happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what? People don't talk about anything.

Stuff your eyes with wonder.

Who has more pockets than a magician? A boy. Whose pockets contain *more* than a magicians? A boy's.

I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I'm borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

I am a dedicated madman, and that becomes its own training. If you can't resist, if the typewriter is like candy to you, you train yourself for a lifetime. Every single day of your life, some wild new thing to be done. You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. Then your public reads you and it begins to gather around your selling a potato peeler in an alley, you know. The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I've written. When the joy stops, I'll stop writing.