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.

Now it is another day. Rain is speaking gently to the terrace. I speak gently, sometimes, to myself. How soft the light is, mingled with the wet. We had one shortened summer month together, Lou and I … my god

The man who built this house—Royall Brown, 1750–1797—is buried in the graveyard up across the road, along with his wife, his son, and his son’s wife and children. I’ve outlived him, at least in the sense that he was forty-seven and I’m now sixty-one. 

Last summer, flying back from Frankfurt, I happened to look up at an overhead screen while trying to learn my lines in Twelfth Night, and for a second I thought I saw myself in a promotional video for Singapore Airlines, among a crowd at JFK two weeks earlier. 

When I was nineteen years old, I dropped out of the Berklee College of Music, where I’d been studying guitar—the one thing I’d ever been halfway good at—to tour with a band that wanted a screaming lead player, and when that all got too stupid and wasted, I moved back in with my parents in Connecticut.

Every Christmas Eve, my father used to drive us down to Uncle Wayne and Aunt Phyllis’s house: a two-bedroom box in a subdivision backed against the Connecticut Turn­pike.

The pub was in the Richmond. It was nice and warm inside, and the walls were decorated with portraits of poets and rebels. He had been here a few times before with Nora, who described it as “a proper pub.”

In Hungary, Richard Hoffman's family had been the manufacturers of Hoffman's Rose Water, a product which was used at that time for both cosmetic and medicinal purposes. 

When I bought a parrot I assumed that the bird would develop a degree of autonomy in its use, or apparent use, of language, but it did not.

When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet.