I Lead A Very Conventional

The Willingness To Accept Responsibility For One's Own Life Is The Source From Which Self-respect Springs.

There Was A Level On Which I Believed That What Had Happened Remained Reversible

California Is A Place In Which A Boom Mentality And A Sense Of Chekhovian Loss Meet In Uneasy Suspension; In Which The Mind Is Troubled By Some Buried But Ineradicable Suspicion That Things Better Work Here, Because Here, Beneath The Immense Bleached Sky,is Where We Run Out Of Continent.

I Never Actually Learned The Rules Of Grammar, Relying Instead Only On What Sounded Right.

People With Self-respect Exhibit A Certain Toughness, A Kind Of Moral Nerve; They Display What Was Once Called *character,* A Quality Which, Although Approved In The Abstract, Sometimes Loses Ground To The Other, More Instantly Negotiable Virtues.... Character--the Willingness To Accept Responsibility For One's Own Life--is The Source From Which Self-respect Springs.