It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

Small, red, and upright he waited, gripping his new bookbag tight in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other, while the first snows of winter floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced all trace of the world.

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.