Corporate Mentality

"One of the things about being a writer is you're able to give the impression-- both in the lines and between the lines -- that you know an enormous amount. That you know and have lived intimately all this stuff. Because you want it to have that kind of effect on the nerve endings. And it's like -- it's something that I'm fairly good at. Is I thin I can seem, I think I can seem like I know a whole lot about stuff that in fact pretty much everything that I know is right there. (144-145)

Saturday cartoons and the Vietnam War

"And I remember being really upset during the Vietnam War, because they would keep intruding on that show, to give updates on the war. And the violence and battle and the war of course didn't make any sense. It wasn't exciting, it was just mostly jerky cameras and, you know, bad, bad film - like bad film quality. And people in kind of ugly khaki, and I never understood it."

"Look, I'm not talking about one of these...this - I mean, this in a way is what the book's about. It's not about, "He watched television until his bladder let go," or something like that -- it's more just, it's a reliance on something." (150)