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

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

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.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

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

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.