What one wants to do with stories is screw them up.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling.

[As] authorities "over" us are removed, as we wobble out on our own, the question of whether to be or not to be arises with real relevance for the first time, since the burden of being is felt most fully by the self-determining self.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.

I cannot walk under the wires. The sparrows scatter like handfuls of gravel. Really, wires are voices in thin strips. They are words wound in cables. Bars of connection.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word