“As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the s...”

“Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?”

“Perhaps the relevant truth- and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal c...”

“...even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery.”

“There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the s...”

“No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable t...”

“This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me”

“In some neighborhoods, faces mature faster than bodies.”

“My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you cant go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people w...”