There are so many different types of writers. It’s just sheer coincidence that they’re all called writers.
No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.
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 each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there’s this great herd, the “herd of independent minds.”
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 everything.
Moral self-infatuation has its own corruptions, after all. With time, almost every other principle of the magazine acquired an ironic echo, a sort of cackling aftermath.
In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.
There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.
It is always self-defeating to pretend to the style of a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.
Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.
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 kind.
My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle’s cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic.
There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.
Most movies are not very good. Most people know it and like to see them anyway.
Hardly anyone about whom I deeply care at all resembles anyone else I have ever met, or heard of, or read about in literature.
Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.
I love the laconic. Clearly, I am not of their number.
The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.
My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind – like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.
The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.