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Grandfather advised me: learn a trade. I learned to sit at a desk.

My mother taught me to rebel within the boundaries of acceptability.

A real or imagined boundary, crossed. End of the line. Lined out.

You can’t ask her not to fall in love when she does it on a daily basis.

They don’t dance but simply monitor our movements, like bodyguards.

How did the light take forty years to work its way across that room.

It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps the evening you died.

The Interests of a writer and the interests of his readers are never...

You sounded so confident about the Old Masters and I loved you for that.

As soon as her grandparents left, BLAM, the dance in her died.

My first suicidal ideations occurred to me when I was ten, eleven, twelve.

A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. It’s a little like cheating.

All down my street the new fathers beat the kingness out of the kings.

A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey. It’s a little like cheating.

Our crowns are made of dead hair and get swept out with the trash.

Words appear like the answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked.

The Warsaw Pact invaded in 1968 and soon banned Hrabal’s work.

I have tried and failed to renew my vows to real trees whom I love.

The suite cost as much as a two-pound brick of Panama Red.

I floated in the tub, my head bobbing, until I felt slick as a seal.

I was bold, even reckless, in what I wrote, and in how I wrote it.

I am left with little Rome for error. I choose wrong, then I revise.

Brassy bullets fell against the floral comforter like little candies.

What counts in the long run is pleasure in conversation with each other.

Peter Taylor’s stories are jigsaw puzzles of nuance and suggestion.

The lock surrendered, after a short struggle, to the poker.

It takes you more than ten thousand years to orbit the sun.