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He is not a man, but an empty shell, a creature who laughs to stop the shame.

Your image is on my credit card, you and the old red, white, and blue.

The materials were everyday and the possibilities were open-ended.

Subtract for the cigarettes, the bourbon, the sleepless nights.

In other words, beachfronts like Bolaño’s and mine are Nowhere.

Everything doesn’t have to mean something, he once said. Now that he’s a father, I want to read him the thing I’m writing about fathers.

Another day, I read my poems and wonder: Where is the world?

It was the sixties, and I was in
college and incredibly restless.

You can get anyone to sleep with you—if you want it bad enough.

Getting answers is easy. The difficult thing is knowing the right questions.

I wanted from my father what I had never wanted or sought: his advice.

He knows what happens before it happens. Next shift, next season.

Betrayal was written on my face, in my eyes, and I knew it.

If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

The old dog of inertia gets up with a growl and shrinks out of the way.

Vultures liked to perch on the austere ledge outside my window.

The boat’s one of the most flagrant symbols capitalism ever spawned.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker, ciao, Antonio.

Wrists will twist or twirl while the hand writes the wriest writs—lamps-lit.

It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task.

Books are territory of the hands, hands that shook my spine.

Your bookself will appear to find you trivial, its nose deep in some tome.

The story is filled with demarcations, limits, invisible as well as overt.

Too bad there is no oil between her legs that 4-year-old Muslim girl.

I saw Baryshnikov twice. Heard Pavarotti, Marsalis, and Ma.

This Lee was a woman, and she was a painter, and she was good.

I stood among them as if in a brothel and inhaled the wind.

I fell asleep wondering to whom the tree might have been writing.

“And if you ever tell anybody what I’m about to tell you, I’ll deny it.”

The store was one of his last-ditch efforts to make a pile of money.