God pity the poor novelist.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise...

object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on...

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.

Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.

Martin thought of the iron El trestles winding and stretching across the city, of department store windows and hotel lobbies, of electric elevators and street-car ads, of the city pressing its way north on both...

And again it snowed, and again the sun came out. In the mornings on the way to the station Franklin counted the new snowmen that had sprung up mysteriously overnight or the old ones that...

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any...