People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any….

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

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sen….

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as th….

If you once cede to the Court the power to decide elections, let alone even the power to halt counting of the votes, then you have ceded it everythin….

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing..

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

I took a little celebrational nap..

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

Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language..

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of the….

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 ….

Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?.

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 ….

Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway..

Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative "criticism" isn't criticism at all: it's just nasty, "writerly" cliché and inve….

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

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born..

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

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world..

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