There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds."

Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.

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

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

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 square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.