Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.