Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

To live is to see, and traveling sometimes speeds up the process.

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.

City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind's eye the notion of a better life ahead.

There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.