Working- and Middle-class families sat down at the dinner table every night - the shared meal was the touchstone of good manners. Indeed, that dinner table was the one time when we were all together, every day: parents, grandparents, children, siblings. Rudeness between siblings, or a failure to observe the etiquette of passing dishes to one another, accompanied by "please" and "thank you," was the training ground of behavior, the place where manners began.

The tradition I was born into was essentially nomadic, a herdsmen tradition, following animals across the earth. The bookshops are a form of ranching; instead of herding cattle, I herd books. Writing is a form of herding, too; I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

I don't do well with changes in my routine. I read at least three newspapers a day, for example. I'm frustrated if for some reason I can't get ahold of all three.

True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriend - and he accepts it

Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak.

The Western notion of masculinity goes back a long way. It doesn’t allow for women, and it’s also racist - it doesn’t allow for other cultures.

I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.