Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.