I’ve never understood about fishing and buffalo stomachs. I admit it freely. I am no cannibal. But there are connections between me and the world.

One of the best books I never wrote was one to cash in on the millennium. I did get as far as the title: The Two Meets the Three Zeros (Uptown).

We drove for hours; whistling over a ribbon of tarmac mea­ suring the perpetual embrace of the shore and the sea, bounded by a fretwork of undulating coconut trees, pure un­ adorned forms framing the seascape into a kaleidoscope of bluish jewels 

The last time I'd seen my father he behaved like one of those wolf-boys, those kids suckled and reared in the wild by animals, and I was never sure, during the ten confusing minutes I stood on the lawn outside the house,

Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins

My brain worked better when I was playing the game full time, straining my body six days a week out there on the sunbaked arena of the field, hurling the ball at demonic speed, scampering after it, steadying myself to catch it while staring into the sun, hitting it with exquisitely timed force.

Dora’s disappeared again. I see her lying in the field, in the abandoned refrigerator. She’s not sleeping and she’s not dead: she’s between these places. And though I’m afraid for her even now, from this distance of years I can tell you Dora Stone is going to live.

My wife stopped weeping just before the real-estate agent met us. We were on our way to see another model home. It had become a Sunday afternoon ritual for us, and by this point we could probably

Heinrich Zeitung Muller-Müller sat silently in the speeding cab and tried not to listen let alone overhear his wife complaining about the risk inherent in wet roads, about the traffic, heavy already, although it was early in the day, about the draft the driver had created by cracking his window, and the smoke of his cigarette which was inconsiderately circulating through the backseat before finding its way out into the street.

Frances Waythorn, her face ghastly as a mime’s from a souring paste of yogurt, scrubs walls and wainscotting, praying for bleach, polish, order, something, to check her daughter’s latest slide from innocence.