The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our ….

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all..

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to ….

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the ….

Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who pe….

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look..

I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position..

I’ve never had anyone’s approval, so I’ve learned to live without it..

Red Hook Road made me happy, and happy to be alive. It took me out of my home on the coast of South Carolina, placed me in the town along Red hook Ro….

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. ….

I would always be a better hater of things and institutions than a lover of them..

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives..

Those wishing to be successful in the market can't ignore the boomer numbers, the wealth and spending power they have..

I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mea….

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law..

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration..

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man..

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself..

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters..

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real..

Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entr….