HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.

There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.

Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.