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.

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.

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.

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

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.

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