The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.

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

Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

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

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.