I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of all, love was not powerful enough to change a life.

Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

In every person's face, there is one place that seems to express them most accurately. With my grandmother, you always looked at her mouth.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

He was a man too busy to flush toilets.