That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow.

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.

You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.

But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.