To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

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

She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

The regional voice is the universal voice.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.