Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature.

In no other sport must the spectator move.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

Women are an alien race set down among us.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.