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.

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

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

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

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.

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.