When the state murders, it assumes an authority I refuse to concede: the authority of perfect knowledge in final things. - John Leonard

I am often wrong. For example, I liked Cop Rock, voted for Nader, and used to think that the preeminent philosophical question of the late twentieth century was whether the government intelligence agency or the semiattached policy-studies think tank represented America's best hope for a viable pluralism. But I may be right, after all, about Stephen King and Walt Disney. No matter how often King shows up on ABC, they haven't yet figured out how to merchandise his dread, how to turn his intuitions and intimations into action figures and fast-food tie-ins and Davy Crockett coonskin caps. It's homemade versus mass-manufactured; bootleg versus theme park; Cujo versus Mickey Mouse.

We are getting to be of an age when it is difficult to grow new friends; we haven't the energy, the time to cultivate; each one gone is a permanent impoverishment.

Run from the Furies, and they find you, as if fear were a homing device, as if literature itself, on contemplating the abyss, were an invitation to jump into it, while Wagner whistles.