There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not.... We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
It is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built The Breakers he damned himself.
You have your wonderful memories, people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the clos...
When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not. On...
We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.
Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty, Philippe Ariès wrote to the...
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened.
This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but...
They worry a great deal about 'responding to one another with beauty and tenderness,' and their response to one another is in fact so tender that an afternoon at the school tends to drift perilously i...
These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.
There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible
The devastation along the Gulf had an inevitability about it: the coast was reverting to its natural state.
That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than when I am home. Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one’s past at every turn, around every corn...
She never puts on any weight, you’ll notice that’s often true of selfish women.
Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted.
Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.
Once she was born, I was never not afraid.