I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

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

He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.

I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!