Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

American energy. . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism

Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.

The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one.

I urge you to be as impudent as you dare. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD.