Richard Yates

"He wrote almost every word of newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all community-service hours in the school's eighteenth-century printshop. "Dick ran everything of a l…"

"Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were…"

"Well, I think Phil's got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know - the outside view. And that…"

"The aesthetic perfectionist, who spent hours slaving over a sentence"

"And he was afraid she might be taking this much too seriously, so he reached out to stroke or tousle her hair, but that didn't work because she'd just been to the hairdresser and didn't want to get it…"

"then he came back and faced her again, trembling. "'Nice,'" he said. "'Nice,' Is that what you want? You want the world to be 'nice'? Because listen, baby. Listen, sweetheart. The world is about as ni…"

"Life goes wrong for the Grimes sisters because "they can't help being the people they are" —Yates's explicit vision of tragedy."

"I see," she said. And when would she ever learn to stop saying 'I see' about things she didn't see at all?"