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...
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...
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.
Hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.
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.
– 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 very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.
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.
I had slipped into that familiar marijuana state which lies between happiness and utter panic, and my heart was pounding.
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.
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
this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
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...
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...
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...
He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style.
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...