“The subject matter is ‘relatable,’ as my students like to say. Better still, though, is what you can learn about the craft of writing from this marvelous book. . . .”

A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography,

My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and thats very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.

Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room.

The funniest novel you’ve never read. . . . Afternoon Men is a revelation to sophisticated readers of every stripe, but especially to a certain kind of artist manqu on the brink of discovering that life is a more difficult business than he ever had reason to expect. . . .

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country.

I see all these students, and I admire them – they’re trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help.

I studied how to mine a landfill and what to plant in it. It’s fascinating because you learn a new field each time.

It was more from my own relationship with the instruments at this time, figuring out the instrument and then having to learn different pieces that I really got into music.

Perhaps they are chasing an illusory dream. But if you want to learn, to expand, to be of service, you will find a way.

What I could not learn was to think creatively on schedule.