It was if we all sensed we’d be gone someday soon in a sudden instant–often it happened in the middle of the night–and didn’t want to get involved. Or else it was that none of...

Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead...

What was our life like? I almost don’t remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

My parents…were people running from the past, who didn’t look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.

Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling,...

…to encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen…

We are past the end of things now, but I don’t want to leave.

Don’t let what your parents do disappoint you.

People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.

Some things can’t be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature’s consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It...

The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when “Hawk” Dawson actually doffed his red “C” cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears – you can’t patent that....

Our ex-wifes always harbour secrets about us that make them irresistable. Until, of course, we remember who we are and what we did and why we are not married anymore.

They may already know too much about their mother and father–nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I’ve...

She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn’t drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its...

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.

He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.

Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people...

I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency—a chaos—, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end...

It was as if they’d discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which...

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

It’s odd to imagine, of course: you pass a car on a lonely rural highway; you sit beside a man in a diner and share views with him; you wait behind a customer checking into...

If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of...

Someone … tell us what’s important, because we no longer know.

In their faces–plenty of them were handsome, but ruined–I’ve seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.

Real mystery – the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book – was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent...

Then, what’s the matter?’ I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life. What’re you thinking? What’s made you so...

She understood perfectly that when the object of anticipation becomes paramount, trouble begins to lurk like a panther.

What’s friendship’s realest measure?I’ll tell you. The amount of precious time you’ll squander on someone else’s calamities and fuck-ups.

With imagination, you can put something where nothing was.

Cynicism makes you feel smart, I know it, even when you aren’t smart.

I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.