I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.
He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy.
You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.
Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.
You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.
No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.
Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.
Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.
People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings - words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.
French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.
We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.
And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings.
