Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

We all have the same dreams.

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of 'living' there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not 'live' at Xanadu.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.