Charlie was Charlie: possessed of "an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people's weaknesses," as Yates put it. Footnote by Blake … - Richard Yates

Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other's discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.

He wrote almost every word of [ Avon Old Farms school's ] newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all community-service hours in the school's eighteenth-century printshop. "Dick ran everything of a literary nature," said classmate Gilman Ordway. "He might have been the only one of us who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life—become a writer of fiction."

Yeah, well, sure, 'remarkably intelligent'. Look, baby, the world is crawling with these diamond-in-the-rough types, these salt-of-the-earth characters, and they're all remarkably intelligent. My God, I knew half-literate guys in the Army who could scare the shit out of you with their intelligence.