Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.