Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the...
Our children will be born of our actions. . Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are...
Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new n...
Oh, sister - good news - I'm getting married! I hugged her but felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face, the same one I wore in London and New York in the face of similar news, and I experienc...
Nowadays I know the true reason I read is to feel less alone, to make a connection with a consciousness other than my own.
Now, every time I learn something more about him, I like him less. So you see, we were better off the way we were.
Now see, with me, said Louie, tiring suddenly of his daughter’s talk, with me I didn’t need dance school, matter of fact I used to rule the dance floor!
Not long ago I sat next to a young Portuguese novelist at dinner and told him I intended to read his first novel. He grabbed my wrist, genuinely distressed, and said: ‘Oh, please don’t! Back then, all...
Nostalgia is a luxury.
My late twenties had passed in a weird state of timelessness, and I think now that not everyone could have fallen into a life like that, that I must have been somehow primed for it.
My father was sent to get the shoes. The pink of the leather turned out to be a lighter shade than I'd hoped, it looked like the underside of a kitten, and the sole was a dirty gray cat's tongue, and...
My childhood took place in the widening gap.
Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its...
Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.
Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones who are just t...
Maybe every author needs to keep faith with Nabokov, and every reader with Barthes. For how can you write, believing in Barthes? Still, I’m glad I’m not the reader I was in college anymore, and I’ll t...
Marilyn Monroe was pretty far along that curve, as close as one can come to dancing while still walking. In her classic 1953 movie Niagara she takes a legendary walk away from the camera, hips swingin...
Libraries are not failing because they are libraries. Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because w...
It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't with love. He was too fucked up to know...
It was like tag, but a girl was never It, only boys were It, girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors,...