Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

At night the cries of cats making love or fighting, their caterwauling in the dark, told us that the world was pure emotion, flung back and forth among its creatures, the agony of the one-eyed Siamese no different from that of the Lisbon girls, and even the trees plunged in feeling.

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.

Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.

It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.