For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Discovery still happens in the writing. You start in nonfiction with a whole lot more going for you, because all the discovery isn't waiting to be made. You've made some of it in the research. As you get deeper into a piece and do more research, the notes are in the direction of the piece - you're actually writing it.

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

Going back to California is not like going back to Vermont, or Chicago; Vermont and Chicago are relative constants, against which one measures one's own change. All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.

Information is control.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time.