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

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.

It's just a deep pleasure to read something you've written yourself - if and when you like it.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

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

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

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