On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

Philip Glass, like [Virginia] Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes, and ends... Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life. For me, Glass [finds] in three repeated notes something of [a] rapture of sameness.

Please, God, send me something to adore.

What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want." "What do we want?" I asked blurrily. "Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted." "What was that?" He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.