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...
Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written...
Irv had rediscovered, as surprisingly few men do, that the secret to perfect male happiness is a well-equipped clubhouse.
I told you, hon, I’m not a real person. This is my job.
I didn't want to be left alone with Timothy, not because I was afraid of him but because I was afraid that somebody would come into the office and see us sitting there, two matching rejects in matchin...
He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style.
He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was.
Eight solid light-years of lead...is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos. I guess the little fuckers are everyw...
Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced t...
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...
She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned.
It was rare but not unheard of for an analysand tossed by tides of transference and desublimation to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier's doorstep or by contrast inflamed with the special hatred of count...
Is there some vital connection between Norman church architecture and the milking of beef cattle of which I am unaware?
I don't like to lose control of my emotions.
He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.
As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.
Bright men in narrow neckties and short haircuts whose terrible optimism made the sixties such an admirable and disappointing time.
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?
Sooner or later, you will discover which kind of father you are, and at that moment you will, with perfect horror, recognize the type. You are the kind of father who fakes it, who yells, who measures...
Joe had run away, escaped without a trace, and come here to hide. But now he was ready to come home. The problem was that he didn’t know how to do it.