How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.