The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories...
Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little y...
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents' bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in...
Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.
The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
No act is so private it does not seek applause.
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd.
It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.
Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.
What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.
Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s sing...
I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn't figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodgi...
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.