To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

The reason ... our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.