The criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity. - Martin Amis

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

I think it's the whole impulse to judge and censor and euphemize, that is the enemy. … What fun, to feel superior to T. S. Eliot. And that's the impulse that I am suspicious of.

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart. The continuity such an impression ignores is a literary continuity.