Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

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.

Sanity ... is the most profound moral option of our time.

Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

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

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