That room – once you enter it, you never really leave. You can forget you’re there, you can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yeah even its length, will reflect the force of your character and the wisdom of your judgments. And then you hit an icy path on a turn one sunny March day and the wheel in your hands becomes a joke and you no more than a spectator to your own dreamy slide toward the verge, and then you remember where you are.

She’d laugh at odd times as we talked and this flustered me pleasantly and made me laugh too, as if we both understood something we couldn’t say.

Getting from La Jolla to Alta Vista State Hospital isn’t easy, unless you have a car or a breakdown. April’s Father had a breakdown and they got him there in no time.

I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry – sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.

It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you’ve snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.

I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is “depressing” because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don’t seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; “witty stories,” in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; “upbeat” stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We’re grown ups now.

It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people.

But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.

Happiness is endless hapiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn’t have much time for anything else.