What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?

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

If there's an enduring theme in my work, it's probably the effects of class on American life.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.

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.