Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.