There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

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.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

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.

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.