I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats
Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention.
When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.
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...
Never say love is like anything... It isn't.
Hyperbolic myths of origin have from the earliest times served to lend a paradoxical plausibility to the biographies of heroes.
Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets f...
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.
Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like...
I had slipped into that familiar marijuana state which lies between happiness and utter panic, and my heart was pounding.
Hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.
What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?
I don't like to lose control of my emotions.
this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
– 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...
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 day you ever have that much control over my behavior, it will be because somebody's asking you, should she get the pine box or a plain white shroud?
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.