Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

It wasn't like the spare rooms of immigrants - packed to the rafters with all that they have ever possessed, no matter how defective or damaged, mountains of odds and ends - the stand testament to the fact that they have things now, where before they had nothing.

Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.