Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table.