Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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

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.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

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

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 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.