She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in obl...
She was a junkie for the printed word. And lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.
She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work.
Motivation, inspiration were not the problem; on the contrary I was always cheerful and workmanlike at the typewriter and had never suffered from what’s called writer’s block; I didn’t believe in it....
Landsman recognizes the expression on Dick's face...The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart...
Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by h...
It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.
It had been quite some time since the duty and pleasure of undressing her son had fallen to Rosa. For several years, she had been wishing him, willing him, into maturity, independence, a general profi...
In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat...
I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife o...
I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing Barefootin’, of the downy slope of her ne...
His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. P...
He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.
He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin.
For as long as I could remember, I'd been making vague and confident assurances that any day I would finish the thing [my book]. If and when I ever did, they would probably feel an almost physical sen...
Crabtree's father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. 'She can make you anythin...
As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like How sane are we? and Do our lives have meaning?
As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.
Anyway, it's a pretty good story, I said. You have to admit.Yeah? He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. You can have it. I'm giving it to you. After I'm gone, write it down....
The baby, not too young to start knowing the ledge, the cold truth, the life-and-death facts of it all. 'What kind of heaven is that, you can't have your records?' The baby, understanding perhaps it w...