The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

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

We don't simply read books. We become them.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.