When you get to readin’ about where the music and John Steinbeck and all those people like that come from, the further you go the more interesting it becomes.

Well, they never know they’re ill, do they? You can’t diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can’t see your own eyeball. So, I suppose you just feel normal...

I think John Coltrane is one of the great American heroes, like Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickinson.

Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys and my boxers between us, I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching – a pale reflection of the fireworks of...