What I expect from writers-and from myself as a writer-is to articulate a complex view of things. To incite us to be more compassionate. To orchestrate our mourning. And to celebrate ecstasy.

It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing - a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

The solution to a problem - a story that you are unable to finish - is the problem. It isn't as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. The problem, properly understood = the solution. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. State it, rail against it.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.