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

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

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

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.

Our loneliness makes us avid column readers these days.

Sophistication" is another word for that inventive mix of tolerance, resilience, and resourcefulness city people develop.

There aren't many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.