When Friends Stop Being Frank And Useful

It Is One Of The Paradoxes Of American Literature That Our Writers Are Forever Looking Back With Love And Nostalgia At Lives They Couldn't Wait To Leave.

Sex Almost Always Disappoints Me In Novels. Everything Can Be Said Or Done Now, And That's What I Often Find: Everything, A Feeling Of Generality Or Dispersal. But In My Experience, True Sex Is So Particular, So Peculiar To The Person Who Yearns For It. Only He Or She, And No One Else, Would Desire So Very Much That Very Person Under Those Circumstances. In Fiction, I Miss That Sense Of Terrific Specificity.

The First Divorce In The World May Have Been A Tragedy, But The Hundred-millionth Is Not Necessarily One.

The Contents Of Someone's Bookcase Are Part Of His History, Like An Ancestral Portrait.

There Is Something About Seeing Real People On A Stage That Makes A Bad Play More Intimately, More Personally Offensive Than Any Other Art Form.