And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit. You got that? And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

You don't have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn't change.

But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.

Oppression lays down blood-lust. It lays it down like a wine.

When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.

This had seemed a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Yeah,' I said and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.

I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.

Einstein's Monsters," by the way, refers to nuclear weapons, but also to ourselves. We are Einstein's monsters, not fully human, not for now.

To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.

In my world, reserved Italians, heterosexual hairdressers, clouds without silver linings, ignoble savages, hard-hearted whores, advantageous ill-winds, sober Irishmen, and so on, are not permitted to exist.

[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.

Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.

The English feel schadenfreude even about themselves.

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are.

Maybe love will be like driving. When people move—when they travel—they look where they’ve come from, not where they’re going.

These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth. These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

Screw-top wine has improved the quality of life by about ten percent, wouldn't you say?

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.