The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

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

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.

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.

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

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.

Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.