It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and...
I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
There is a common superstition that self-respect is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations...
Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of...
Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trail...
Cos’è che rende malvagio Jago? Si chiede certa gente. Io non me lo chiedo mai. Altro esempio, un esempio che viene in mente perché la signora Burstein stamattina ha visto un serpentello a sonagli tra...
I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this pl...
Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispi...
I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was...
Privilege is something else.Privilege is a judgment.Privilege is an opinion.Privilege is an accusation.
I was told that the disorder was not really in my eyes, but in my central nervous system. I might or might not experience symptoms of neural damage all my life. These symptoms, which might or might no...
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who b...
We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as ordinary blessings.
I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.
How could this have happened when everything was normal?
We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.Let them become the photograph on the table.Let them become the name on th...
I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those dau...
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
The apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and why we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people...
What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?