Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.

The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.