The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or "reads" for them.

To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.