My eyeglasses keep getting out of line and I go back to the shop where the man bends them and fidgets with the nose pads and they’re fine for a while, until they go out again.

It was only eleven in the morning, and it was a school day, but there were groups of high school kids at the bay beach. With cans of beer, with tape decks and car radios turned up loud; with pimples on their mouths, and expensive cars, and the drifting intermittent scent of reefer.

I come from a long line of bourgeois Americans. All the men were lawyers, landowners, or clergymen. One great uncle was a congressman. All the women were ladies.

A writer spins plots in the most condensed forms possible. they are stripped of description and comment; they simply outline a sequence of exchanges. she gradually looses the ability to make herself write them out as stories.