The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.