What smells strongly of crap to one generation - Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies - so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.

A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner