
In the dank utility room deep in the subbasements of my personality, a little man wiped his hands on his overalls and pulled the switch: More.

Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

He was a rube, but he was no tourist.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

At ninety, everything is air and the difference between you and the medium of your passage is disintegrating with every increment of the ascension.

She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

Even angels are animals.

There was no recourse, were no laws but the ones rewritten every day.

Judge not the dysfunctions of others, let ye be judged.

Craftsmen and artisans created items that were brittle rumors compared with his father's iron facts.

Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you.

Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.

You can't rush inspiration.

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

Pick your fights like you pick your nose: with complete awareness of where you are.

memory has a palette and broad brush.

Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.

Live every minute as if you are late for the last train.

But we have all been branded even if you can't see it, inside if not without

This isn't going to un-fuck itself.

Three cheers for your rich interior life, may it serve you well come rent day.

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties.

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

The future? The future was the clay in their hands.

He possessed a strange facility for the mandatory.

Life! What Inscrutable Card Shall Ye Throw Next Upon the Soft Felt of Our Days?

Georgina hailed from Delaware and had that vexing way of Delaware ladies, delighting in puzzles.

Weeks passed, but my Word-A-Day Calendar was stuck on motherfucker.

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment.

He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it.

Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

You go on about reasons," Cora said. "Call things by other names as if it changes what they are. But that don't make them true.

She wasn't surprised when his character revealed itself - if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.

The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

This city is reward for all it will enable you to achieve and punishment for all the crimes it will force you to commit.

And what else but a being cursed with the burden of free will would wear a poncho.

That's how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?

But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

Don't be afraid: you have a best seller on your hands.

Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.

Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.

The buttons of his dark blue uniform allude to an ongoing border dispute with his soft belly.

One day a pickaninny was happy and the next the light was gone from them; in between they had been introduced to a new reality of bondage.

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

She gulped the air like water, the night sky the best meal she had ever had, the starts made succulent and ripe after her time below.

Sarsaparilla boiled for one of Sybil's tonics, overpowering the aroma of the roasting meat. Cora

If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.