Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.

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.

People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.

The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or "reads" for them.

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.

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