I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure

The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo.

One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.

When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading. He did not stir. They placed a straw hat on his head. No response. Only when they took away the wooden chair on which he was sitting did he, as he puts it, 'wake out of the book'.