"We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are." — William Gaddis

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?