Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.

Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.

'Camp' is a vision of the world in terms of style - but a particular style. It is the love of the exaggerated.