Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.
He didn’t want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
Richard’s bookshelves weren’t alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn’t find.
It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.
The future could go this way, that way. The future’s futures have never looked so rocky. Don’t put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It’s the real stuff, the only stuff, it’s all there is, the present, the panting present.
It’s hard to make progress with grief.
When it comes to flying, I am a nervous passenger but a confident drinker and Valium-swallower.
I say the sentences again and again in my head until they sound right.
Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.
Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.
While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk.
I’m afraid the negative things are always the great subjects. Failure is much more interesting than success.
One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There’s no going back.
I don’t think I’d like Manhattan anymore. My mother-in-law lives there, and you go there. But I like looking at it from a distance. It’s a fantastic sight – every time, it awes me.
Let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what’s funny, they don’t know what’s serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn’t be trusted with anything.
There’s a lot of anti-intellectualism in Britain. And the writer’s views on this or that are really of less importance, as they see it, than that of the man in the street.
Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark – spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It’s passing, yet I’m the one who’s doing all the moving.
It is straightforward – and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.
America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn’t sure what it was.