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"They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover."
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"When you don't know where to start,just go to a place you miss so much."

"Sometimes to return is a vulgarity."

"Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breedsAlong the pebbled shore of memory!Many old rotten-timber'd boats there beUpon thy vaporous bosom, magnifiedTo goodly vessels; many a sail of pride,And golden keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry."

"Eden is that old-fashioned house we dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode until we drive away."
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"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."


"But when she was annoyed with me, she had a cold way of saying "Apparently in answer to almost anything I said, making me feel stupid. "Um, I can't find the can opener. "Apparently. "There's going to be a lunar eclipse tonight. "Apparently. "Look, sparks are coming out of the wall socket. "Apparently."


"To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone."


"Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist."


"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."


"The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides."


"Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life-a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple-the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last-it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer-there it is."


"The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work."


"On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business."


"What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Well-most people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid."
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