From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.