Robin Turned And Looked Straight Into Her.

The More You Pursue Distractions, The Less Effective Any Particular Distraction Is, And So I'd Had To Up Various Dosages, Until, Before I Knew It, I Was Checking My E-mail Every Ten Minutes, And My Plugs Of Tobacco Were Getting Ever Larger, And My Two Drinks A Night Had Worsened To Four, And I'd Achieved Such Deep Mastery Of Computer Solitaire That My Goal Was No Longer To Win A Game But To Win Two Or More Games In A Row--a Kind Of Meta-solitaire Whose Fascination Consisted Not In Playing The Cards But In Surfing The Streaks Of Wins And Losses.

Expecting A Novel To Bear The Weight Of Our Whole Disturbed Society—to Help Solve Our Contemporary Problems—seems To Me A Peculiarly American Delusion. To Write Sentences Of Such Authenticity That Refuge Can Be Taken In Them: Isn't This Enough? Isn't It A Lot?

We May Freak Out Globally, But We Suffer Locally.

If You Read The Biographies Of People Who Have Written Good Books, You Often See The Point Where They Suddenly Come Into Themselves, And Those Weeks In The Spring Of 1997 Were When I Came Into Myself As A Writer. They Feel Like Some Of The Best Weeks Of Writing I’ll Ever Have. The Discovery That I Could Write Better About Something As Trivial As An Ordinary Family Dinner Than I Could About The Exploding Prison Population Of The United States, And The Corporatization Of American Life, And All The Other Things I’d Been Trying To Do, Was A Real Revelation.

If You're Interested In How People Behave, If You're Interested In The Way They Talk About Themselves, The Way The Conceive Of Themselves, It's Very Hard To Ignore Drugs Nowadays, Because That Is So Much Part Of The Conversation.