You Can't Find Peace By Avoiding Life.

Maybe It’s Not, In The End, The Virtues Of Others That So Wrenches Our Hearts As It Is The Sense Of Almost Unbearably Poignant Recognition When We See Them At Their Most Base, In Their Sorrow And Gluttony And Foolishness. You Need The Virtues, Too—some Sort Of Virtues—but We Don’t Care About Emma Bovary Or Anna Karenina Or Raskolnikov Because They’re Good. We Care About Them Because They’re Not Admirable, Because They’re Us, And Because Great Writers Have Forgiven Them For It.

Philip Glass, Like [virginia] Woolf, Is More Interested In That Which Continues Than He Is In That Which Begins, Climaxes, And Ends... Glass And Woolf Have Both Broken Out Of The Traditional Realm Of The Story, Whether Literary Or Musical, In Favor Of Something More Meditative, Less Neatly Delineated, And More True To Life. For Me, Glass [finds] In Three Repeated Notes Something Of [a] Rapture Of Sameness.

I Suspect Any Serious Reader Has A First Great Book, Just The Way Anybody Has A First Kiss.

It's The World, You Live In It, Even If Some Boy Has Made A Fool Of You.

Insomniacs Know Better Than Anyone How It Would Be To Haunt A House.