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.

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

It would be hard to define chaos better than as a world where children decide they don't want to live.

A writer's work is to witness things.

We New Yorkers see more death and violence than most soldiers do, grow a thick chitin on our backs, grimace like a rat and learn to do a disappearing act. Long ago we outgrew the need to be blowhards about our masculinity; we leave that to the Alaskans and Texans, who have more time for it.

Man is different from animals in that he speculates, a high-risk activity.