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.

I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.

I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds."

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

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.