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.

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.

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

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.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

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.