There was something about her playing… a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.

Secrets—even in hardened criminals, they were just air pockets lodged under debris at the bottom of an ocean. It might take an earthquake, or you scuba diving down there, sifting through the sludge, but their...

It was true. After our divorce, I’d ended up in a slight relationship with my last research assistant, Aurelia Feinstein, age 34-though let me state for the record it was not as hot as it...

I couldn’t help but suspect something he’d seen or encountered had changed his view of what had happened between them. It had somehow set him free. And he’d let it fly, that gorgeous blackbird of...

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

Betrayal isn’t ridiculous. It’s the reason empires fall.

She was lost now, she’d been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova’s warped tree.

His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerge charred doves.

No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines–ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we’re lost, wholly incapable of separating...

…I couldn’t let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million...

L’Avventura,’ Dad said, ‘has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination-we’re talking about the...

I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life’s answers worked out the day they’re born and there’s no use trying to teach them anything new. ‘They’re closed for business even...

A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.

I need to give you one last bit of advice in the off chance this rather extraordinary and enviable situation in which you find yourself is actually true- that somehow you’ve fallen deep down into...

Well, it doesn’t look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about.””Don’t sell yourself short. You’re more Masterpiece Theatre.

Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over—she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern...

And that fear I’d felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have...

I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person you liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek...

Well, life isn’t a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world’s most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of...

she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the...

They saw me. Milton’s smile curled off his face like unsticky tape. And I knew immediately, I was a boy band, a boondoggle, born fool. He was going to pull a Danny Zuko in Grease...

One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector’s Dream.

Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of wilderness. They needed reincarnation. To die and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking...

Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam –

If I learned anything about her it was that she lived with a vehemence most of us never have the courage for.” Banks tells me. “But there was something about her that precluded an ordinary...

I don’t believe. Religion? Humans desperate to take out infinity insurance. Death? The great big nada. Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. [..] Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything...

Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can’t help it. Classical music isn’t just music. It’s a personal diary. An uncensored confession in the dead of night. A baring of the...

I’d actually questioned my sanity, wondered if this was it: the substandard past few years had finally led to a mental break with reality, and now, floodgates open, there’d be no limit to the fiends...

How scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead.

As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.

Dad’s romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).

Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she’s stillbanging Charles after all these years —””Like a screen in a tornado. Sure.