"Standing still as a statue in the October shadows, he looked, grotesquely, more like a patriot than anything usually …"

"A Broadway play is so much an event, designed down to the bit parts to explode in your face on one particular night, …"

"I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewr…"

"It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from …"

"Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their f…"

"Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home ev…"

"When a reviewer says that Malamud is second only to Bellow, it means he really isn't thinking about either of them. W…"

"People talk about talent as though it were some neutral substance that can be applied to anything. But talent is narr…"

"What he feared most was the blind spot between us and the future, the space between identities where we could get los…"

"The rational man may talk a good game about suicide, but reason must give way to obsession and finally squalor before…"