You aren’t sure if you’re making the right decision – about anything, ever.
Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.
Aging and its evidence remain lifes most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
It’s just a deep pleasure to read something you’ve written yourself – if and when you like it.
Information is control.
I have never started a novel – I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel – I’ve never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.
You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you’re writing, and if it doesn’t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can’t imagine that moment when it suddenly will.
For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.
I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it.
I recognize a lot of the things I’m going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
Burroughs’s voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.
I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages.
There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.
It’s hard to find a book that’s safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.