Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of 'work,' because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere; and somewhere hearts are light; And somewhere men are laughing; and little children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville- great Casey has struck out.

In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.

He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.

you've got to burn straight up and down and then maybe sidewise for a while and have your guts scrambled by a bully and the demonic ladies, you've got to run along the edge of madness teetering, you've got to starve like a winter alleycat, you've go to live with the imbecility of at least a dozen cities, then maybe maybe maybe you might know where you are for a tiny blinking moment.