"Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?"

"My fathering had always taken the form of a friendly cloud that floated across the lives of the children, and paused …"

"Everybody remembers his or her first magic show. Mine was in a garage in the dark. I passed out bowls of peeled grape…"

"For every wicked witch there is, in our culture, a black magician, an alchemist, a Flying Dutchman, a Doctor Strangel…"

"Do you suppose Latin American writers, trying to mix literary modernism with revolutionary politics, resent our blue-…"

"Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays."

"Run from the Furies, and they find you, as if fear were a homing device, as if literature itself, on contemplating th…"

"Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make …"

"Crossing color, class, gender, and generational lines, the communities of addiction and recovery are as democratic as…"

"There are too many ironies in the fire!"