To write is human, to edit is divine.

God always punishes us for what we can't imagine.

Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.

The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.

In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.