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.

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.

I read passionately with a need to know and see the act of reading as an act of cognition and not simply a means of passing time.

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.

There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.

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.

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.