There Are No Amateurs In The World

I've Got Death Inside Me. It's Just A Question Of Whether Or Not I Can Outlive It.

Every Sentence Has A Truth Waiting At The End Of It And The Writer Learns How To Know It When He Finally Gets There. On One Level This Truth Is The Swing Of The Sentence, The Beat And Poise, But Down Deeper It's The Integrity Of The Writer As He Matches With The Language. I've Always Seen Myself In Sentences. I Begin To Recognize Myself, Word By Word, As I Work Through A Sentence. The Language Of My Books Has Shaped Me As A Man. There's A Moral Force In A Sentence When It Comes Out Right. It Speaks The Writer's Will To Live.

No Sense Of The Irony Of Human Experience, That We Are The Highest Form Of Life On Earth, And Yet Ineffably Sad Because We Know What No Other Animal Knows, That We Must Die.

You Feel Sorry For Yourself. You Think You're Missing Something And You Don't Know What It Is. You're Lonely Inside Your Life. You Have A Job And A Family And A Fully Executed Will, Already, At Your Age, Because The Whole Point Is To Die Prepared, Die Legal, With All The Papers Signed. Die Liquid, So They Can Convert To Cash.

The Smoke Alarm Went Off In The Hallway Upstairs, Either To Let Us Know The Battery Had Just Died Or Because The House Was On Fire.