Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.

I'm not good at small talk; I'm not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn't come up.

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.

We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.