I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off.
My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
Most of the time you're too busy to think about it. But every now and then you say, 'I work at "Saturday Night Live," and that is so cool.
I don't do interviews at all when I'm on tour, so this time, on a day off, I'll do that kind of thing a little bit. I don't do big promotion schedules, not when I'm touring.
But I was feeling quite down at the time. I was living in L.A., which was kind of weird for me.
I have only been funny about seventy four per cent of the time. Yes I think that is right. Seventy-four per cent of the time.
I don't like to practice ahead of time what I'm going to say.
When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.
But each time I seemed to be climbing into a roller coaster and finding myself coming through the downhill run with that sort of dazed feeling that we all know.
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
I am reasonably happy. I didn't find Jesus or anything like that. Part of it is that I just feel that I could go home. I did not feel like that for a long time, but I could go back now.
I'm contemplating moving to London for a period of time. I've been in Los Angeles for 15 years and I'm really tired of it. I'm continually uninspired by what's being sent to me. Even by huge films that they're doing there. They're just awful.
I was separated from my wife at the time. A lot of people think I wrote it about prison.