William Safire, Jr.: You've got to take your fork and cut down, right down the seven or eight layers and then take a spoonful or whatever it is and you see the confluence of flavors.
Kurt Cobain: I'm not even hungry.
•••
Safire, Jr.: Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it.
Cobain: When they're afraid of what's in front of them they always look back. You know what I wanna see?
Safire, Jr.: It was a tightly held secret. And everybody smiled, but nobody watched what they said because I was an old-timer.
Cobain: Yeah, but I don't know what they're about. I don’t know.
Safire, Jr.: Yeah. That was one of my assignments.
•••
Cobain: Chalk one up for capitalism. But in sixth grade I realized, "Wow, my whole life really sucks. Everyone I know is an asshole."
Safire, Jr.: They'll starve to death, or they'll have to commit suicide or whatever.
•••
Cobain: I get tired of reading real descriptive prose, so I've lately taken to reading everything Charles Bukowski has written. That’s scary. You have to psyche yourself up.
Safire, Jr.: But two drinks and he—his voice would become slurred and he was quite relaxed.
Cobain: He's a fun-loving guy. That comes before anything else; it comes before philosophy, image or playing live.
Safire, Jr.: Yeah, he would occasionally talk about that as one of the six crises. I never saw anything that would suggest that.
Cobain: You don't have to believe it, but you can write it.
Safire, Jr.: Absolutely. The silent majority is an old phrase meaning dead people.