A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.
Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.
If their work is satisfying people don’t need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.
Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.
Sex times technology equals the future.
What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.
The only truly alien planet is Earth.
I feel that the surrealists have created a series of valid external landscapes which have their direct correspondences within our own minds.
Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
I’ve never suffered from writer’s block. I have plenty of ideas, sometimes too many. I’ve always had a strong imagination. If it dries up I’ll stop and look for another career.
I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.
Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.
I don’t think it’s possible to touch people’s imagination today by aesthetic means.
Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.
But I wouldn’t recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.