The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.

In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.

It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls

I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.