All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life. - John Cheever

He was a tall man with an astonishing and somehow elegant curvature of the spine, formed by an enlarged lower abdomen, which he carried in a stately and contented way, as if it contained money and securities.

The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.