You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul-not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those that knew you.
So much of one’s life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.
Life was long, unless you died, and he didn’t intend to spend the next sixty years talking about the last twenty-two.
He felt a touch of sadness now that it had happened, now that he knew what it was like. Not because it wasn’t enjoyable, or wouldn’t be repeated, but because one more of life’s mysteries had been revealed.
Henry,” he said. “You are skilled. I exhort you.
She’s been reading too much, he thought -had drifted across that line that separated what you might find in a book from what you might do.
You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.
This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it’s a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.
A lot of writers choose to live in New York, partly because of the literary culture here, and partly because Brooklyn’s a pretty nice place to live. And a lot of writers who might not geographically reside in New York still point their ambitions towards New York in some sense.
It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can’t get anywhere else.