New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that admiration, if they're not used to being written about, if they're civilians, [...] they're not used to seeing themselves through other people's eyes. So you will always see them from a slightly different angle than they see themselves, and they feel a little betrayed by that.

New York is full of people . . . with a feeling for the tangential adventure, the risky adventure, the interlude that's not likely to end in any double-ring ceremony.

In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices.

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

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.