Many people found our house spooky, and the attic in fact as full of evil when I was born. It housed a collection of more than three hundred antique and modern firearms. Father had bought them during his and Mother's six-month honeymoon in Europe in 1922. Father thought them beautiful, but they might as well have been copperheads and rattlesnakes. They were murder.

This is my principal objection to life, I think: It is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.

I hadn't aimed at anything. If I had thought of the bullet's hitting anything, I don't remember now. I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, t…

Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking …

When I was a kid, I asked my Mother for a Bubble Bath, so she brought the water to a boil!

When I was a little kid we had a sand box. It was a quicksand box. I was an only child... eventually.

A child develops individuality long before he develops taste. I have seen my kid straggle into the kitchen in the morning with the outfits that need only one a…