Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.