Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.