Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

I think I'm more intensely opinionated when I speak; more agreeably balanced when I write.

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share. You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.