I don't have all the facts. And I might misremember. As a matter of fact, after I finished Winter Journal, I realized that I'd gotten someone's name wrong.

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

A canteen I remember vividly, and maybe one other thing, I can't remember. And I knew then that he had bought them in an army surplus store that day and he wanted to maybe enhance himself in my eyes, and say, "Well, yes, I have been in the army." Or [he] simply just didn't want to disappoint me. It could have been one or the other. But I knew that he had lied to me. And this filled me with a tremendous sort of anger towards him. At the same time, knowing he was trying to please me, so feeling good about him.

Let me tell you, there's no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of a workaday world.

I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life.

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth