Maybe I’m tired, he said. Maybe I’m tired of picking up life in bits and fistfuls and little drawstring bags. When you get to be as old as I am, there’s an appeal in the idea of seeing some business t...
Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time lapse photos of a promise as it broke.
Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It's the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The...
Life blew in gusts from the hole in the side of the elephant with a rank smell and a comic flatulence.
Let’s blow their little minds. A mind is not blown, in spite of whatever Hollywood seems to teach, merely by action sequences, things exploding, thrilling planetscapes, wild bursts of speed. Those are...
Joe learned to view the comic book hero in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not all viole...
I’m always thrilled, wrote Alan Cheuse, emphasizing the novelty and, perhaps, the faint air of slumming that attends the notion of McCarthy’s move to the science-fiction neighborhood, when a fine writ...
I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by...
I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that...
It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had...
It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.
It was nice standing out in the darkness, in the damp grass, with spring coming on and a feeling in my heart of imminent disaster.
It was just an old clock, your honor, he told Smith, looking at once relieved and disappointed. In the desk of a Mister … Clay. Taped to a couple of dowels painted red. I knew it, said Joe softly, sta...
It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal...
In his combination of earnestness, social conscience, and willingness to scrap, he was a perfect hero for 1943, as America went about the rumbling, laborious business of backing itself into a horrible...
I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I like what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude towar...
I don't want to have 'carnal knowledge' with any old Zuni, asshole. From the way she seemed to relish the word asshole as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a...
I can imagine anything except having no imagination.
Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.
Defiantly serving out the inhumane term of a punishment she had imposed on herself, confusing obedience with rebellion and vindication with endurance. Come, he told her. Put your costume