Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

We all have the same dreams.

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

I don't write for catharsis; I have to write to understand.

I lead a very conventional life.

Anything worth having has its price.