When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it,...
What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one pl...
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?
Time is the school in which we learn.
The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New H...
Rarely have we seen so much made over so little.
Out where the skies are a trifle bluer Out where friendship’s a little truer That’s where the West begins.
One of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.
Marriage is the classic betrayal
It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.
It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for...
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life...
I was not going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life reduced to a short story. I was going to Honolulu because I wanted to see life expanded to a novel, and I still do.
I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.
I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for Ameri...
I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen.
As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed comm...
1966 and 1968 were a world removed from each other in the political and cultural life of the United States . . .
Some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.