The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?
Doesn't that make life a story?

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

May books spread the world over!

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

But immobilizing darts don't bring on sleep gently, like a good cup of tea; they knock out like a bottle of hard liquor straight up.

Roetown, of mixed economy, neither boom nor bust, just ordinary times — that is, hard — had a slightly run-down aspect, I suppose. But in a pleasing way, like a man you love who has buttoned his coat up wrong.