Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

I have not been the witness I wanted to be.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us… We play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.