As for Naipaul's willingness to talk with me, he said, in his beautifully modulated voice, “It’s not correct for a person of my stature to appear on a giveaway sheet. It’s not right. It’s not right.”

The Altar of the Body opens with George sitting on his porch on a hot day in Medicine Lake, Minnesota. He watches a man push a Lincoln Continental. “It’s an old car, a four-door boater, champagne-colored.…”

“Millay was the generation of my grandmother, so when you begin the biography of someone of this age, you realize the people you need to interview who are living may not be living a great deal longer."

“You’re living in two worlds. You’re living in a public one, and you believe it, you believe that the Russians are your enemies. And you’re living in a private world where this Russian is the father you love.”

And T.S. Eliot, I remember his giving a reading at the University of Michigan, and the entire football stadium was filled to hear him speak. Eliot had that kind of celebrity. He had a kind of authority.

“Going from New York Press to Talk was a bit like going from the St. Ann’s School to the Collegiate School. At New York Press you could pretty much wear whatever you want.

“It’s funny, too. The people I really wanted to meet were writers. I had some notion of meeting Flannery O’Connor, you know, or even now, I imagine meeting Cormac McCarthy. Writers were my heroes.”

“Liberalism went from being populist to being corporate, from being Jeffersonian to being New Deal. And it had its greatest successes, and it also had its greatest defeat, as a result of that change."

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

Dead, dead, dead is what I think now when I think, “Father.” My father’s dead. My father’s underground. More than a decade, my father’s moldered. His big belly’s deflated. His big belly’s dust and rubble. …

"In Texas, people will laugh at anything. So you can still learn things from reading out loud there, but you can’t think, ‘Oh well, this works great. They laughed in Texas.’ Maybe they’re just trying to be polite."

"You would be surprised at the number of gerontophiles. You realize there are a lot of people who didn’t take notice of you when you were in your 20s, who get interested once you’re over 45 or 55.”

They seemed vaguely hostile toward Brookner’s stories. “Nothing happens,” one said. We argued a bit. I suggested that plenty happened; it was just that what happened, happened inside her characters’ heads rather than between sheets or on battlefields.

Jon, who was as old as Uncle Carl was then, which was 50-something, shook his head and looked sad. Jon had a long, narrow head and skin that always looked tanned because he used a sun lamp.

I didn’t become an historian and I didn’t become a Cold War researcher. With my father’s encouragement, I spent a long time trying to create a life that wasn’t just being the son of Alger Hiss.

Dillard is one of those writers whose work I so admire that I dread interviewing them. I always think, before I dial up the telephone numbers, “I should leave them alone to do what they do so well.”

“Bump,” “The Bomp,” “El Bompo,” “The Bump,” “Bompy,” “The Cigar.” Nobody who knew Frank Bompensiero called him by those names. “If you were a friend or family member,” said Bompensiero’s daughter Mary Ann, “you called …

I don’t know how in the first months of 1955 Frank Bompensiero managed to get himself out of bed to face the day. I don’t know how he slept at night. Frank and Thelma and …

When 44-year-old Frank Bompensiero awakened at 5878 Estelle Street on the first morning of a new decade, he must have felt optimistic. He must have felt hopeful. He padded on his bare size-ten feet into …

“During World War II,” a retired San Diego policeman told me, “the hoods in the downtown bars made plenty of money. Don’t let anybody fool you. The reason they made more money than anyone else …

Frank Bompensiero’s daughter Mary Ann is talking. She stops and wipes away a tear with the back of her hand. Her father was gunned down execution-style in February, 1977, in a Pacific Beach alley. Mary …

Frank Bompensiero jumped off a freight train in San Diego in the early 1920s. He was 16 or 17 or perhaps even 18 years old. He was five feet, six inches tall. He had hazel …

Some evening soon, drive out to Pacific Beach. Be there about 8:15. The sun will have been down several hours. Across the sky every last orange and violet streak will be gone. Take a jacket. …

“With men, from the beginning, I was messed up. Drinking exacerbated that. One of the things that alcohol really enabled me to do was to mess up my connection to men and to never have to really think about it."

What a sense of humanity permeated his stories! He had seen the worst of men. Even people that you know he doesn’t like and you wouldn’t like if you knew them, he is compassionate towards.

Stevens finally assented to his father’s bleak view and became a lawyer. He moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and worked for 30 years at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, becoming one of its vice presidents.

I wasn’t happy when I found a book I’d written, inscribed by me to another writer, for sale at Powell’s in Portland. But I did not have to be embarrassed in the way that Theroux must have felt embarrassed.

I am not ready to starve my dislike so that an enemy, or someone whom I perceive as enemy, or someone who merely irritates me, can eat buttery joy. I am selfish.

Mehta in Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, merges the history of his own development as a writer with a biography of Shawn. Anyone interested in how a writer works will find Mehta’s book usefully instructive.

As much research as I did in Amsterdam, and as much help as I had with the police business and the prostitute business and the city, I can truthfully say that the shoe idea was mine.

Reichl’s mother suffered from manic-depressive illness and veered between hilarity and near catatonia. She also not infrequently made up meals for family and guests from food that was just plain spoiled.

Ms. McDermott writes in Child of My Heart a horrible, grisly, bloody scene with a cat. The scene was so well-wrought in all its bloodiness and horror that I found myself looking away from the page.

I asked Mrs. Barr how it had felt, to read the letters her sister, from the time they were both young, had written to her. Some of the letters, I said, were condemnatory and even angry.

You tuck into your overstuffed chair, a book in your hand. Let’s make believe the book is Kerouac’s On the Road (published finally in 1957) and let’s make believe that, , you’ve never before read it.

Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this.

I hate walking along the street and seeing cars filled with families driving to grandmother’s house. I hate for the neighbors to see me and to imagine their thinking, “I wonder if she has any place to go.”

"Words that rhymed meant a lot to me, and also were very comforting. I liked knowing things by heart so that when I felt weird or bad or couldn’t sleep, I could repeat them."

“The new editor at the New Yorker isn’t interested in writing, at all. At first I didn’t understand that she wasn’t interested in writing. That she was, you know, interested in giving a good party.”

I did what I would have advised anyone to do. I said to my face in the bathroom mirror, a pale face made paler by the bathroom’s subaqueous light, “You’ve got to quit living on peanut butter.”

Christy Scheck, on March 6, 1992, a Friday evening, walked into a bathroom in Southwood Psychiatric Center's Residential Treatment Center in Chula Vista (now called Bayview and under new management). Thirteen-year-old Scheck had been a …

“We have variously independently chosen a week of poems and worked collaboratively. All three of us read books and journals that we receive from publishers. We try to put poems together that hang together….”

He read for an hour. Then stopped. Still, he’d never looked up. People rose to their feet. Clapped. Clapped louder. All at once Schuyler looked up from the table into the faces that fell down before him.

Midsummer nights, I not infrequently put myself to sleep considering the taste of a warm, ripe apricot. I imagine the apricot’s sunrise color, the red blush along its curve. I imagine the apricot’s heft in …

“I found a job as an editor with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which happened to be moving to San Diego, in 1982. I had an office on the 11th floor of that lovely old wedding-cake building.”

In 1899, 5 million gallons of ice cream were sold in the United States; by 1909, 30 million gallons; by 1919, 150 million gallons. The most recent figures show that Americans annually eat 23 quarts.

“Not long ago, after a reading, a woman asked me to sign her bare breast. I think that she was looking for a strange secular blessing that readers feel has singled out the writer.”

"In 1992, she got about $40,000, I think, for the renewal of the film rights for On the Road. She thought that with this money she could move to Key West. She loved the blue water there."

“We belonged to what was called the Rec Center in Tiburon. It eventually became the Tiburon Peninsula Club. But it was the club where the middle-class people that populated Tiburon when I was a child played.”

Merton and Milosz met face to face twice, once at Merton’s monastery and once over lunch in the Bay Area. “He said that Merton was very pleasant, very down-to-earth, somewhat surprisingly unstuffy for a monk.

If you think nothing happened here in the 1950s, consider this. “Willie the Rat" Cammisano from Kansas City settled in Kensington on Lymer Drive. Momo Adamo from Los Angeles by way of Kansas City and …