Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

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

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.

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.

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.

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.

Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.