What Now

What job will you apply for? What exactly are you qualified to do? When I graduated I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but where was the ad in the paper for that one? “Novelist wanted: should be able to stare. Light typing required.”

I just couldn’t imagine living in a house with another person when so much of my life was spent sprawled across the sofa, eyes wide open, saying nothing at all.

I can remember many times when the flight attendant would close up the door to the plane and say, “We’re going to Dallas” and someone would pop up from their seat and say, “What do you mean, Dallas?” Of course, this was not what had happened to me. I had gotten lost long before I ever made it to a plane.

I’d like to tell you to appreciate your youth, to stop and admire your own health and intelligence, but every writer has a cliché quota and I used up mine by saying, When I was sitting where you are now.

There was a pay phone downstairs, but it was prohibitively expensive, and anyway, there was always somebody parked on it, usually the beautiful girl from Caracas. We called her the Venezuelan Princess, and she had enough money to talk to her family in South America for hours on end

only thing anyone asked me back then was, Where are you going to college? Everywhere I went I felt as if I were being hounded by my own Greek chorus