I've Always Been Very Upfront About The

Whenever I Read A Passage That Moves Me, I Transcribe It In My Diary, Hoping My Fingers Might Learn What Excellence Feels Like.

Sometimes With 'the New Yorker,' They Have Grammar Rules That Just Don't Feel Right In My Mouth.

I Was The Type Of Person Who Was The Question-asker. And Not Just Genuine Questions, I Would Ask A Question So The Author Would Know How Much I Knew About Them. Once I Went To A Tobias Wolff Reading. I Knew He Was Teaching At Syracuse At That Time. And So, I Remember Asking Him How He Liked Syracuse. People Do That To Me Now And It's Okay. There Is Rarely A Time When I Just Have Had Enough.

What I Really Hated, Of Course, Was My Mind. There Must Have Been An Off Switch Somewhere, But I Was Damned If I Could Find It.

It's A Common Mistake For Vacationing Americans To Assume That Everyone Around Them Is French And Therefore Speaks No English Whatsoever. [...] An Experienced Traveler Could Have Told By Looking At My Shoes That I Wasn't French. And Even If I Were French, It's Not As If English Is Some Mysterious Tribal Dialect Spoken Only By Anthropologists And A Small Population Of Cannibals.