How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. - Salman Rushdie

You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that's an old American tradition, see?, that's the American way.

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

An intimacy of strangers. That's a phrase I've sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.