Go Home. Cut your losses. Stay. Go for it. You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy. All these voices waving their arms and screaming at one another.
You described the feeling you'd always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn't worry quite so much about why.
I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
There is a shabby nobility in failing all by yourself.
You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity.
Great minds sink alike, right?
Add anchovies to almost anything, in moderation, and it will taste better.
Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art.
Tears come to your eyes, and you feel such a rush of tenderness and pity that you stop beside a lamppost and hang on for support.
Here you are again. All messed up and no place to go.
I love to imagine inside the head of a woman.
Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.
The definition of gumbo is almost as slippery as that of Creole. Just as gumbo can contain pretty much any kind of meat or seafood, Creole is a vague and inclusive term for native New Orleanians, who may be black or white, depending on whom you're asking.
I don't think I've left a trail of weeping women in my wake. I mean, the number of serious relationships I've had has not been into double digits.
There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.
I remain a fan of my friend Bret Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho.' I think as a book about New York in the '80s it was pretty excellent.
From the window, Luke looked out over the water towers of Fifth Avenue to the park, studying the senescence of the daylight, which seemed almost viscous, ready to coagulate—trying to register that perfect moment of transition from day to evening, that instant when the light, in dying, was most nearly itself.
It's like, you can't trust anybody, and if somebody you know doesn't fuck you over it's just because the price of selling you down the river was never high enough.
My former wife is a very eccentric woman, which is why I still love her.
I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.
Mine is not an autonomous imagination.
I think a lot of the people who write about me think that if they had to write fewer interviews then they would transcribe their life-story and it would be a big success. Or should be.
There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.
The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. It looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic. I could use one of those right over my heart, you say.
You keep meaning to cultivate an expertise in spectator sport. More and more you realize that sports trivia is crucial to male camaraderie. You keenly feel your ignorance. You are locked out of the largest fraternity in the country.
You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to what seems merely a chain reaction of pointless disasters.
The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two a.m. changes to six a.m.
Sometimes you feel like the only man in the city without group affiliation.
Three months later—a Jewish girl having in the meantime explained the fundamentals of kosher dining—he returned to the B & H Dairy Bar, and when, finally, the old man asked him if he'd ever been in a restaurant, Jeff answered, I don't know—you ever worked in one? After that he was a New Yorker. Cruising.
Yeah, 'Gossip Girl' is a good show. It's a real New York show, like 'Sex and the City.'
Most of the people I write about have been ambitious outlanders who have been attracted to New York from other parts of the world.
Love is the eternal quest: almost everyone wants to love and be loved.
If being a spokesman for a generation is a fleeting occupation, being a symbol of an era is downright dangerous for anyone who has the bad luck to outlive it.
There aren't many shy writers left.
And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours.
Love is recreational, it needs not be aspirational.
You know, I'm always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.
The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.
I feel that there's a lot of would-be guardians of the culture who think that high-minded literary purpose and the life that gets chronicled in the gossip columns, that these two things are incompatible.
The capacity for friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.
I always hope people will like me, and I'm always afraid they will think I'm a fraud. I try harder than perhaps I should to make people like me, then it backfires. They think I'm a buffoon.
She said that certain facts are accessible only from one point of view--the point of view of the creature who experiences them. You think she meant that the only shoes we can ever wear are our own. Meg can't imagine what it's like for you to be you, she can only imagine herself being you.
It's the cynics who never get married.
Sometimes I think everything I touch turns into a Page Six item.
Memories lurk like dustballs in the backs of drawers. The stereo is a special model that plays only music fraught with poignant associations.
Eat, drink and remarry is my motto.
When the train begins to move they return to their Posts and their private sorrows.
Bottles of wine aren't like paintings. At some point you have to consume them. The object in life is to die with no bottles of wine in your cellar. To drink your last bottle of wine and go to sleep that night and not wake up.
When you catch yourself lying to your therapist, you know it's a waste of money.
