When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a...
We figure he must have let him out. The perpetrator, I mean. He's blind and we figure he just wandered off and maybe got run over.The perpetrator.No, the dog.
Vulgar language, Chan said...Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say.
Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
Tommy had never been successful at explaining himself to adults because of their calamitous heedlessness,
To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her. A moment after he
Thoughtfully or thoughtlessly he had left the keys in the ignition, and I switched on the radio. It was tuned to WQED. A local arts reporter I didn’t particularly admire was interviewing old Q. about...
This was the writer's true doppelgänger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house key...
This is in my opinion why writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let...
They had an old-fashioned sincerity...that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesised in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collec...
There’s something purely foolish about attending any large gathering of men and women without benefit of some kind of philter or magic dust to blind you and weaken your critical faculties. I don’t mea...
There is no more useless activity than that of periodization, the packaging of history, in particular cultural history, into discrete eras—the Jazz Age, the Greatest Generation, the Eisenhower years,...
Then, abruptly, it was his turn to feel ashamed, not only for having extended, however momentarily, the consideration of his sympathy to a Nazi, but for having produced work that appealed to such a ma...
The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, an...
The truth is that comic-book creators have simply lost the habit of telling stories to children. And how sad is that?
The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash.
The special-order French bees were prey to wanderlust and ennui. But
The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood—sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolle...
The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characte...