Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

optimism is a disease

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.