Quotes About Author

Everybody who was anybody seemed to be going to a meeting, the glowworm, who was a solipsist, the lemur who was not.

Karen, she's a silver sun. You best walk her way and watch it shining...watch her watch the morning come.

After the United States entered the war, I joined the Naval Reserve and spent ninety days in a Columbia University dormitory learning to be a naval officer.

There's also a great post from the Datadog team on visualizing time series data that is worth reading.

the King Cole room, and the Oyster Bar at Grand Central.

rain—was grappling for her wallet. "Maybe

You saw Dionysus, I suppose? I had not meant this at all seriously, and I was startled when nodded as casually as if I'd asked him if he'd done his homework.

Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time.

with all your chick peas and your filthy little pocket breads?

as skilled a dissembler as I was, I could barely be civil to him;

As tiny as she was, the resemblance sounded: her coloring, her eyes, her head cocked at the same angle and hair as red as his.

a short, fiery mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen

It was a state which might have seemed a suspiciously narcotic one except that it differed so little from his customary manner.

You never know. Because—" brow furrowed, tapping out a bit of soft black powder on his palette—"I never dreamed that all that old furniture of Mrs. De Peyster's would be the thing that decided my future.

I wish you smoked. I don't know why you don't. You weren't an athlete in high school or anything, were you?" "No." "That's why Bun doesn't smoke. Some clean-living type of football

He had a habit, as I was later to discover, of trailing off into absorbed, didactic, entirely self-contained monologues, about whatever he happened to be interested in at the time

Um—" I turned to the shop window to compose myself, and my transparent ghost turned to meet me, crowds passing behind me in the glass.

This piece, not of the first quality, doesn't fit with anything else I own, and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?

The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.

sure how that was going to work, but once I got Boris out of the house I could figure something out. "Please, come on." "Is State Care that bad in America?" said Boris doubtfully.

I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

Wrap it in newspapers and pack it at the very bottom of the trunk, my dear. With the other curiosities.

And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.