To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

...catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves...I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.