Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set.
Being ill like this combines shock – this time I will die – with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.
I am in an adolescence in reverse, as mysterious as the first, except that this time I feel it as a decay of the odds that I might live for a while, that I can sleep it off.
I awake with a not entirely sickened knowledge that I am merely young again and in a funny way at peace, an observer who is aware of time’s chariot, aware that some metamorphosis has occurred.
I can’t change the past, and I don’t think I would. I don’t expect to be understood. I like what I’ve written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I’ve written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn’t do it.
I am startled when people are themselves and are not my thoughts of them.
I have the sense that if I push too hard or too far into memory I’ll come apart.
You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.
Death and I are head to head in a total collision, pure and mutual distaste.
But death’s acquisitive instincts will win.
The disparity between what people said life was and what I knew it to be unnerved me at times, but I swore that nothing would ever make me say life should be anything...
Nothing I have ever written has been admired as much as the announcement of my death.
I often thought men stank of rage; it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.