Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

The ears, which master the face of a dunce, are that part of the head which most publishes stupidity.

We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it's often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they're gone.

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

I kneel to my Lord because I am such a failure. I pray, I hope, I look to the Gospels.

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.