Writing is a form of self-flagellation.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

Writing is a form of self-flagellation.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.