To young people born under the weird planet of the SAT, intelligence was equated with agility, with raw acuity. It produced a certain sort of person of which I was a typical specimen: the mental conto...
A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to...
I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: go to New York. And if you can't go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are...
Endless soaring toy-rocket dreams and schemes that let out a sad, weak 'pop' at their high climax point and then flake apart as they tumble toward some thorn patch that's also a hatching ground for ba...
The mist just keeps on lifting and soon I'll be able to see all the way, as far as the earth's curvature allows. It's a blessing, that curvature, that hidden hemisphere-if we could take it all in at o...
Liars are exhausting people.
His voice sounded more sincere in these surroundings, less distorted by pride and pain.
I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.
I preferred that my bad dreams be vague.
I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood.
I sensed the presence of wizened bachelor potters working in sheds behind their mothers’ houses.
I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.
I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone.
I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
If I had to pick between knowing just a little about a lot of folks and knowing everything about a few, I'd opt for the long, wide-angle shot, I think.
@bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.
What was more humiliating, I wondered: having to beg for someone's cold chicken bones or being offered them?
Who all these people, so many of them brown? What this ritual unfolding around him? I've never seen a German look as German as Clark did when he assessed his likely assessors. His eyes were like sm...
It looked like just the sort of family Americans dream of having: dumb and loving.
Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.
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