One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.

What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents.

It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.