One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.

I've always essentially been a New Yorker.

This church was open and seemingly unattended, and it was a throwback in another way as well. The candles in the little side altars were real ones, actual wax candles that burned with an open flame. Lots of churches have switched over to electrified altars. You drop your quarter in the slot and a flame-shaped bulb goes on and stays on for your quarter's worth of time. It's like a parking meter, and if you stay too long they tow away your soul.

To say I drank my way into marriage isn't much of an exaggeration, and it's none at all to say I drank my way out of it.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.