p3 - “what a blow to the ego it can be to have to read over anything you wrote 20 years ago.”

p4 - “the main character’s problem was real and interesting enough to generate a story on its own. Apparently, I felt I had to put on a whole extra overlay… I was operating on the motto “Make it literary”

p5 - “My mistake being to try to show off my ear before I had one.”

p6 - “One makes the amazing discovery that grown adults walking around with college educations, wearing khaki and brass and charged with heavy-duty responsibilities, can in fact be idiots.”

p7 - “a book i still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac”

p10 - “It is no secret nowadays, particularly to women that many American males, even those of middle-aged appearance, wearing suits and holding down jobs, are in fact, incredible as it sounds, still small boys inside.”

p11 - “Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of racist, sexist and proto-Fascist talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that this is only Pig Bodine’s voice, but, sad to say, it was also my own at the time.”

p15 - “The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything – or to put it more usefully, we are often unware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.”

p18 - “The Bomb … There was never anything subliminal about it, then or now … most of the rest of us poor sheep have always been stuck with simple fear. I think we all have tried to deal with this slow escalation of our helplessness and terror in the few ways open to us, from not thinking about it to going crazy from it. Somewhere on this spectrum of impotence is writing fiction about it …”

p21 - “Part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then to be “too autobiographical.” Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite.”

p21 - “more shared levels of the life we all really live”

p116 - “I imagine far enough down the Nle one gets back to a kind of primitive cleanness.”