It's hard for writers to get on with their work if they are convinced that they owe a concrete debt to experience and cannot allow themselves the privilege of ranging freely through social classes and professional specialties. A certain pride in their own experience, perhaps a sense of the property rights of others in their experience, holds them back.

It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thru…

Apparently the rise of consciousness is linked to certain kinds of privation. It is the bitterness of self-consciousness that we knowers know best. Critical of…

Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

You know that it would be untrue You know that I would be a liar If I was to say to you Girl, we couldn't get much higher. Come on baby, light my fire - Come o…

You advise me, too, not to stray far from the ground of experience, as I become weak when I enter the region of fiction; and you say, 'real experience is peren…

Very early on, I determined not to let other people's lack of imagination define my life.