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

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

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.

There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

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

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.