It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and invective.

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.

the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.