Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood. - Edmund White

This isn’t a banana republic. You can’t pull strings in America, pay off an official, lean on your cousin. It’s not like France or Spain – those banana republics.

Other writers, especially the ones you admire, can steer you to good books.

For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve — then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging.