Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth.

Boston - wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming - has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

I have come to the belief that there is not merely an accidental relationship between bad writing and routine sociological research, but a wonderfully pure, integral relationship; the awkwardness is necessary and inevitable.

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.