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I don't have a sense of sanctuary. I don't have a place where I think I can go. I once went to the famous Kyoto temple with the Zen garden, the gravel, the little mounds and it's, you know, it's been pictured over and over and over again. And what they don't tell you is that this little acre or some acre of serenity is surrounded by millions of people taking pictures.
So it sounds like a storm of mosquitoes constantly. And it never stops. And there's no serenity. And so not even in Japan can I find sanctuary.

John Leonard

It makes me itchy, this wry fatalism, but it doesn't make me itch nearly as much as the heroes of so many other modern novels for whom stalking the savage libido is more fun than kinship or community; who will leave town either to find their callow selves, as if they'd lost anything important, or, more transgressively, to kill a bear, a bull, a whale, a unicorn, a hippogriff, a signifier or, preferably, their fathers.

John Leonard

Run from the Furies, and they find you, as if fear were a homing device, as if literature itself, on contemplating the abyss, were an invitation to jump into it, while Wagner whistles.

John Leonard