The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.

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

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.

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

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

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.

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