A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
I'm really an alarmist when it comes to epidemics. Swine flu now; when SARS was big, I was all freaked out about that, bird flu. That terrifies me.
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.
What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. It's really hard to do a literary reproduction of what makes you happy. That's what I try to do. If nothing else, it seems like there's enough people out there telling the world what isn't cool, or what's terrible, or what's depressing. I think there's an element of cynicism in my writing, but I'm an optimistic cynic.
I really hate being sick. It seems inevitable that at one point, one of these predicted epidemics is going to be real. So often they come up, and there's people like me that are freaked out, and the majority of people are just like, "You're being idiots, this happens every other year. "
I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.
We called [the] process photomontage, because it embodied our refusal to play the part of the artist. We regarded ourselves as engineers, and our work as construction: we assembled our work, like a fitter.
A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!
In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.
President Obama invited John McCain to the White House to give his opinion on Egypt, specifically what it's like to be a mummy.