I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.

I've always essentially been a New Yorker.

While at SMLA, I wrote a science fiction short-short called “Make A Prison.” It worked its way all the way down to the very bottom of the S-F food chain, finally selling to Bob Lowndes at Original Science Fiction Stories for a half cent a word, then wound up in Judith Merril’s prestigious annual anthology. I was elated – but I never wrote another piece of science fiction.

I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.

Fiction writing starts off by requiring the towering arrogance that enables one to sit down at the typewriter in the belief that someone somewhere will actually be eager to read the productions of our own private imaginations. But that arrogance must be buffered by the humility that leads us to learn our craft and strive to make our work comprehensible and inviting and accessible to the reader.

You got to ask a street question to get a street answer.

The New Your energy goes beyond anything you’ll find anywhere else. It’s too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us.

Hopper was neither an illustrator nor a narrative painter. His paintings don’t tell stories. What they do is suggest – powerfully, irresistibly – that there are stories within them, waiting to be told. He shows us a moment in time, arrayed on a canvas; there’s clearly a past and a future, but it’s our task to find it for ourselves.

WHEN you hit a gay bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon you wonder why they don’t call it something else.

Come on in,” Elaine said. “She’s already here. Pam, this is Mr. Scudder, Matthew Scudder. Matt, I’d like you to meet Pam.