He carried his childhood like a hurt warm bird held to his middle-aged breast.

With short stories, the story-teller must have a story to tell, not merely some sweet prose to take out for a walk

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

The steady pressure to consume, absorb, participate, receive, by eye, ear, mouth, and mail involves a cruelty to intestines, blood pressure, and psyche unparalleled in history.

Catastrophe and desire are linked in our lives as the moon is linked to that reflected light from the sun which enables the eye to see it.

If mankind is naturally good, he is sure going against his nature more and more of the time. It sounds like a bad joke: the paranoids are after us.

Old age is wasted on the elderly: the young know what to do with it-insist on something different.