A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future, and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly.

Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade.

Mulligan: invented by an Irishman who wanted to hit one more twenty yard grounder.