the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress.

I took a little celebrational nap.

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place.

Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.