“Bump,” “The Bomp,” “El Bompo,” “The Bump,” “Bompy,” “The Cigar.” Nobody who knew Frank Bompensiero called him by those names. “If you were a friend or family member,” said Bompensiero’s daughter Mary Ann, “you called …

I don’t know how in the first months of 1955 Frank Bompensiero managed to get himself out of bed to face the day. I don’t know how he slept at night. Frank and Thelma and …

When 44-year-old Frank Bompensiero awakened at 5878 Estelle Street on the first morning of a new decade, he must have felt optimistic. He must have felt hopeful. He padded on his bare size-ten feet into …

“During World War II,” a retired San Diego policeman told me, “the hoods in the downtown bars made plenty of money. Don’t let anybody fool you. The reason they made more money than anyone else …

Frank Bompensiero’s daughter Mary Ann is talking. She stops and wipes away a tear with the back of her hand. Her father was gunned down execution-style in February, 1977, in a Pacific Beach alley. Mary …

Frank Bompensiero jumped off a freight train in San Diego in the early 1920s. He was 16 or 17 or perhaps even 18 years old. He was five feet, six inches tall. He had hazel …

Some evening soon, drive out to Pacific Beach. Be there about 8:15. The sun will have been down several hours. Across the sky every last orange and violet streak will be gone. Take a jacket. …

“With men, from the beginning, I was messed up. Drinking exacerbated that. One of the things that alcohol really enabled me to do was to mess up my connection to men and to never have to really think about it."

What a sense of humanity permeated his stories! He had seen the worst of men. Even people that you know he doesn’t like and you wouldn’t like if you knew them, he is compassionate towards.

Stevens finally assented to his father’s bleak view and became a lawyer. He moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and worked for 30 years at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, becoming one of its vice presidents.

I wasn’t happy when I found a book I’d written, inscribed by me to another writer, for sale at Powell’s in Portland. But I did not have to be embarrassed in the way that Theroux must have felt embarrassed.

I am not ready to starve my dislike so that an enemy, or someone whom I perceive as enemy, or someone who merely irritates me, can eat buttery joy. I am selfish.

Mehta in Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, merges the history of his own development as a writer with a biography of Shawn. Anyone interested in how a writer works will find Mehta’s book usefully instructive.

As much research as I did in Amsterdam, and as much help as I had with the police business and the prostitute business and the city, I can truthfully say that the shoe idea was mine.

Reichl’s mother suffered from manic-depressive illness and veered between hilarity and near catatonia. She also not infrequently made up meals for family and guests from food that was just plain spoiled.

Ms. McDermott writes in Child of My Heart a horrible, grisly, bloody scene with a cat. The scene was so well-wrought in all its bloodiness and horror that I found myself looking away from the page.

I asked Mrs. Barr how it had felt, to read the letters her sister, from the time they were both young, had written to her. Some of the letters, I said, were condemnatory and even angry.

You tuck into your overstuffed chair, a book in your hand. Let’s make believe the book is Kerouac’s On the Road (published finally in 1957) and let’s make believe that, , you’ve never before read it.

Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this.

I hate walking along the street and seeing cars filled with families driving to grandmother’s house. I hate for the neighbors to see me and to imagine their thinking, “I wonder if she has any place to go.”

"Words that rhymed meant a lot to me, and also were very comforting. I liked knowing things by heart so that when I felt weird or bad or couldn’t sleep, I could repeat them."

“The new editor at the New Yorker isn’t interested in writing, at all. At first I didn’t understand that she wasn’t interested in writing. That she was, you know, interested in giving a good party.”

I did what I would have advised anyone to do. I said to my face in the bathroom mirror, a pale face made paler by the bathroom’s subaqueous light, “You’ve got to quit living on peanut butter.”

Christy Scheck, on March 6, 1992, a Friday evening, walked into a bathroom in Southwood Psychiatric Center's Residential Treatment Center in Chula Vista (now called Bayview and under new management). Thirteen-year-old Scheck had been a …

“We have variously independently chosen a week of poems and worked collaboratively. All three of us read books and journals that we receive from publishers. We try to put poems together that hang together….”

He read for an hour. Then stopped. Still, he’d never looked up. People rose to their feet. Clapped. Clapped louder. All at once Schuyler looked up from the table into the faces that fell down before him.

Midsummer nights, I not infrequently put myself to sleep considering the taste of a warm, ripe apricot. I imagine the apricot’s sunrise color, the red blush along its curve. I imagine the apricot’s heft in …

“I found a job as an editor with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which happened to be moving to San Diego, in 1982. I had an office on the 11th floor of that lovely old wedding-cake building.”

In 1899, 5 million gallons of ice cream were sold in the United States; by 1909, 30 million gallons; by 1919, 150 million gallons. The most recent figures show that Americans annually eat 23 quarts.

“Not long ago, after a reading, a woman asked me to sign her bare breast. I think that she was looking for a strange secular blessing that readers feel has singled out the writer.”

"In 1992, she got about $40,000, I think, for the renewal of the film rights for On the Road. She thought that with this money she could move to Key West. She loved the blue water there."

“We belonged to what was called the Rec Center in Tiburon. It eventually became the Tiburon Peninsula Club. But it was the club where the middle-class people that populated Tiburon when I was a child played.”

Merton and Milosz met face to face twice, once at Merton’s monastery and once over lunch in the Bay Area. “He said that Merton was very pleasant, very down-to-earth, somewhat surprisingly unstuffy for a monk.

If you think nothing happened here in the 1950s, consider this. “Willie the Rat" Cammisano from Kansas City settled in Kensington on Lymer Drive. Momo Adamo from Los Angeles by way of Kansas City and …

Some hard guys came to town after the war. A big ex-con with the cold eyes of a killer drove in from Kansas City. He parked in front of a white stucco house in Kensington. …

"There is practically a love relationship between me and Anna Swir. Though we were not lovers at all, but it is sort of by empathy I feel her body, so to say.”

San Diegans awaken on the Friday morning of March 21, 1952, to clear skies, northeasterly winds, highs in the 60s promised by afternoon. Harry Truman is president. Ex-Navy pilot and ex-San Diego State football star …

Bob Guthrie, in the summer of 1941, got a job driving a truck. He had graduated from Point Loma High School in 1940 and gone on to State. His job was a summer job. He …

“You have to get it all in a historic context,’ Mr. Willis said. “The Italianos, or Sicilianos, began to come here to America back around 1870. The main group on the West Coast came to …

"I had just moved to the house in Ithaca. I was driving back to the old rental. On the way over it occurred to me there wasn’t a yearly ‘best of’ book devoted to American poetry."

“Raymond Carver used to teach here [Syracuse University],” said Wolff in a recent telephone interview, “and I came because of him. It was meant to be a year, but we’ve stayed nearly 17."

RIGHT OFF, no sooner than five minutes after we stepped onto Pioneer Park’s green lawn, we met up with an elderly black-and-tan fellow gone white at the muzzle and sporting a red-and-white stripped Dr. Seuss …

“I was in Mississippi a number of years ago when an infamous former Klansman was arrested for a murder that took place in the 1960s. I was bothered at the time by the unanswered question….”

“Through most of my childhood he was in the grocery business, which meant he wasn’t home a lot. And I left home after high school. So I thought I didn’t have enough to write about.”

I said that unlike many historians of Bloomsbury, Mr. Bell treats Lady Ottoline with great kindness in his account of her. “Ah, I couldn’t do otherwise because she was very good to me really.”

"I took the wrong turn in New Jersey and got under the Pulaski Skyway instead of on it. I finally had to call Mr. Shawn from a pay phone to say I was going to be late."

One of us said that if you gave it a French name, people happily would eat dog food. No sooner was this thought spoken than Reginald and I were throwing on coats and heading to Safeway.

I didn’t say anything. For two reasons. One was that my mother hated “emotional displays,” and the other was that how I really felt was that I was glad it was Penny dead and not me.

"The serial killer has become our debased, condemned, yet eerily glorified Noble Savage, the vestiges of the frontier spirit, the American isolato cruising interstate highways in van or pickup truck.”

I remember breakfast tables from my earliest childhood; sunshine spills across a blue-checked tablecloth stiff with starch and fresh air. Cut-glass bowls hold jelly and jam. The Concord grape and strawberry wriggle, seem to live …