Writing is like being in a dream state or under self-directed hypnosis. It induces a state of recall that - while not perfect - is pretty spooky.

You'll consider what you did wrong & bookend your reflections with hunger - no supper, no breakfast.

Madness is a kind of mental suicide.

One night when my longing for her was like a fire burning out of control in my heart and my head, I wrote her a letter that just seemed to go on and on. I poured out my whole heart in it, never looking back to see what I'd said because I was afraid cowardice would make me stop. I didn't stop, and when a voice in my head clamored that it would be madness to mail such a letter, that I would be giving her my naked heart to hold in her hand, I ignored it with a child's breathless disregard of the consequences.

In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.

God and the afterlife and all that is certainly a subject that's interested me, and I think it interests me more the older that I get.

The best show on television is Red Sox baseball. Everything else sucks.