Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time.

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.

I took a little celebrational nap.

Fear ... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.

I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the herd of independent minds.

Fear... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic.

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.

The time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.

I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.

Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.