The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

Rats live on no evil star

The trouble with therapy is that it makes life go backwards.

O starry night, This is how I want to die

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.