The Army-Navy Game

Whenever you're seriously writing a book you're in crisis, which is why so few serious books are written; no one or almost no one wants to be in crisis, a continual condition in which something's always wrong with you.

The people I'm most interested in really have no sense of time, (or), their sense of time is all their own, unique to them and to the world. So much could be learned by a rigorous study of how time is used--how a writer uses time, a baker, a football announcer, and so on...

Last night I finally came to grips with my problem with POTUS: that I can't understand him by understanding, nor do I have any real creative response to the situation he's created. This is an extremely uncomfortable position for me to be in, compounded by my new understanding of how monumentally stupid this president is, breathtakingly stupid.

Reading Chateaubriand's Memoirs, I see ambition consuming Napoleon as he marches into Russia. Ambition can be ruinous, yet lack of ambition can eventually catch up to you and kill you as well.