The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.