Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and invective.

Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

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.

The motion picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on people - on acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes ... No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes.