Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.

The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.