The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.
It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves “New York Society.
Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.
It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.
I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
People would rather be deceived than have the truth cause them anxiety.
So if it seems that some of what I’ll have to say in the pages to come doesn’t reflect the mellowing of age, that’s only because I’ve never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.
I’m a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don’t get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you’re writing about, rather than into the world you’re in.
I, like most of my friends, couldn’t believe I bought a mountain called Misery Mountain, because it was so appropriate.
Still, it’s an interesting technique-leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And in someone else.
The definition of terrorism is killing civilians with the intent of changing their political affiliation.
I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I’m just trying to understand where it came from.
Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.
It didn’t make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don’t deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences.
I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.
People are disturbed enough by serial killers, but the whole notion of female violence, particularly maternal violence – the idea of mothers who kill – really unnerves people.
She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren’t the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.
I have to be very careful, however, because I have no intention of providing an excuse for this behavior. It’s an attempt to explain how so many women come from backgrounds where the pressure to be a good mother is so severe that if they can’t do it, something really snaps.