I've never written nearly as much about place as people seem to think I do. I just write about class.

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.

America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about -- acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.

Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.