People In Small Towns, Much More Than

As I Drift Back Into Sleep, I Can't Help Thinking That It's A Wonderful Thing To Be Right About The World. To Weigh The Evidence, Always Incomplete, And Correctly Intuit The Whole, To See The World In A Grain Of Sand, To Recognize Its Beauty, Its Simplicity, Its Truth. It's As Close As We Get To God In This Life, And Reside In The Glow Of Such Brief Flashes Of Understanding, Fully Awake, Sometimes For Two Or Three Seconds, At Peace With Our Existence. And Then Back To Sleep We Go.

If You Work At Comedy Too Laboriously, You Can Kill What's Funny In The Joke.

Knowing And Knowing What To Do About It Were Two Different Things.

Where Was The Middle Ground Between A Sense Of Adventure And Just Plain Sense?

A Couple Years Ago, The Novelist Russell Banks Told Me He Was Reading The Ancient Greek Historian Herodotus. I Asked Why. He Said, 'because I've Always Wanted To And Am Tired Of Having My Reading Assigned.' I Thought It Was A Marvelous Declaration Of Independence.