The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window ro...
You can write great books, the great man continued. Or you can have kids. It's up to you.[...]Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became, and the more books you produce...
He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.
Hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.
Then I reminded myself that I was always willing to listen to arguments in favor of avoiding an unpleasant chore, and I shook my head.
The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.
I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That's another way of saying it was all I had.
I had slipped into that familiar marijuana state which lies between happiness and utter panic, and my heart was pounding.
From the first that was a part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose. He
Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention.
– Докторе, аз съм инженер, електроинженер. Това е образованието ми. Инженерите отделят много време за нещо, което се нарича анализ на повредата. Независимо от това дали проектираш, изпитваш, или изгра...
You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?I don't think so.Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That's why I just keep daring myself to do things I'm afraid of doing.He had a no...
You read my Cosmo? I read all of your magazines. I took all the love quizzes and pretended I was you answering the questions. How did I do? You cheated, I said.
It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, t...
I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it.
He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of gra...
Although in the past I had seen a few exchanges of genuine affection between them, the Warshaw men were awkward and ill at ease with each other.
Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murd...
We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place...
Sammy felt, that morning, with his ribs bruised and a wan flavor of chlorine at the back of his mouth, that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving.