That's right, I am a book kisser.

I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?

That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice. I'm traveling heavy with illusions.

I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.

Funny how a little politeness can change people's minds.

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.