Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

Teaching ... particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing.

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself