Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

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