We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

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.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything