When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.

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.

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.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

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.

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

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