I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be only human, subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadn...
I saw a group of women standing by a station wagon. There were seven of them, pushing cartons and shopping bags over the open tailgate into the rear of the car. Celery stalks and boxes of Gleem stuck...
I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back ho...
Her sweat is a rank reminder, the only one, that she exists, that she is separate from the things that surround her.
Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I'd try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I'd figure out how old I'd be when the centur...
Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
[We] saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?
Within sixty-minute limits or one-hundred-yard limits or the limits of a game board, we can look for perfect moments or perfect structures. In my fiction I think this search sometimes turns out to be...
Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you...
When I read obituaries I always note the age of the deceased. Automatically I relate this figure to my own age. Four years to go, I think. Nine more years. Two years and I'm dead. The power of numbers...
This country is toilet-oriented.
Then they’re always trying to sell you something. Everything is based on forcing people to buy. If you can’t buy what they’re selling, you’re a zero in the system.
Their true lives lie below, even now beginning to reassemble themselves, calling this very flesh out of the air, in mail waiting to be opened, in telephones ringing and paper work on office desks, in...
The city is a device for measuring time.
Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.
People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.
Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass...
Let's enjoy the aimless days while we still can.
It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Do...