September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it's often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they're gone.

The urge for Chinese food is always unpredictable: famous for no occasion, standard fare for no holiday, and the constant as to demand is either whim, the needy plebiscite of instantly famished drunks, or pregnancy.

It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.

Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.

I thought... their elegance... lies not so much in their clothes as in their bodies, and their bodies have received it, and continue to unceasingly receive it, from their souls, which are just like yours, lovely Simonetta.