I need you to write something down, he said. It was, he said, for his new book, not for mine, a point he stressed because I was at the time researching a book that involved sports...When I gave him th...
I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and...
I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a wa...
I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.
I closed the box and put it in a closet.There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, di...
I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.
Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe? The first to send his wild wild vibrations to all those cosmic superstations? For the song he always shouts sends the planets flipping o...
Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter,
At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girls' school, any work of hers was le...
As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.
As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come t...
Anthony Lewis had written in The New York Times in September of 1975, only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible becaus...
Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginning of...
All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother...
Above all, she is the girl who feels things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.
About the cathouse: the notion that an accepted element in the social order is a whorehouse goes hand in hand with the woman on a pedestal.
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?It is easy to decei...