The Future Is An Empty Canvas Or

America Is About Class. To Pretend That It Isn't Is Very Ignorant. No Society Has Ever Existed Without Some Kind Of A Ruling Class.

I Begin To Understand That Failure Is Its Own Reward. It Is In The Effort To Close The Distance Between The Work Imagined And The Work Achieved Wherein It Is To Be Found That The Ceaseless Labor Is The Freedom Of Play, That What’s At Stake Isn’t A Reflection In The Mirror Of Fame But The Escape From The Prison Of The Self.

From Authors Whom I Read More Than Once I Learn To Value The Weight Of Words And To Delight In Their Meter And Cadence -- In Gibbon's Polyphonic Counterpoint And Guedalla's Command Of The Subjunctive, In Mailer's Hyperbole And Dillard's Similes, In Twain's Invectives And Burlesques With Which He Set The Torch Of His Ferocious Wit To The Hospitality Tents Of The World's Colossal Humbug . . . I Know No Other Way Out Of What Is Both The Maze Of The Eternal Present And The Prison Of The Self Except With A String Of Words.

It Isn't Money Itself That Causes The Trouble, But The Use Of Money As Votive Offering And Pagan Ornament.

Usually When I Drank Too Much, I Could Guess Why I Did So, The Objective Being To Murder A State Of Consciousness That I Didn't Have The Courage To Sustain--a Fear Of Heights, Which Sometimes During The Carnival Of The 1960s Accompanied My Attempts To Transform The Bourgeois Journalist Into An Avant-garde Novelist. The Stepped-up Ambition Was A Commonplace Among The Would-be William Faulkners Of My Generation; Nearly Always It Resulted In Commercial Failure And Literary Embarrassment.