My father once told me that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for. If you don’t know that, he said, what are you worth? Nothing. You are not a man at all.
I search for my mother’s face in the mirror and see a stranger.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect murder,” Tom said to Reeves. “That’s just a parlor game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That’s different.” Tom was bored.
My mother thinks I’m dead. Obviously, I’m not dead, but it’s safer for her to think so.
Because of the nature of my illness, and its effect on my brain, I remember only flashes of actual events, and brief but vivid hallucinations, from the months in which this story takes place.
Tales of groundbreaking innovation sound a lot alike. Like action-adventure movies, they have a predictable structure.
If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.
“In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of.”
Truth be told, I’m not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it’s been my experience that most people don’t want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.
I don’t know how I should live. I don’t know how anyone should live. All I know is how I do live. I live like a peeled snail. And that’s no way to make money.
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army. Visiting Kathy’s grave was the less dramatic of the two.
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth.
It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.
If you come with me on this journey, I think a word of warning is in order: manic depression is not a safe ride.
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
The first thing I remember tasting and then wanting to taste again is the grayish-pink fuzz my grandmother skimmed from a spitting kettle of strawberry jam. I suppose I was about four.
War entered my childhood world not with the blasts of rockets and bombs but with my father’s footsteps as he walked through the hallway, passing my bedroom toward his.
It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.