Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.
On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Feud painting his cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Audi full of rash behavior that la...
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....
Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting...
Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random hap...
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...
Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling moth...
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...
It was, in part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that alwa...
It was the pleasure that a liar takes in his lie as it enters the world wearing the accent and raiment of the truth, sounding so right and plausible that--if he is any kind of liar at all--he begins,...
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 him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.
It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a for...
It holds my essential stuff, including a book—for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one's pocket[…]
In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.
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 smiled. I supposed she was exhibiting what people nowadays refer to, with crushing disapproval, as denial. It’s always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be know...
