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

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

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.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

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.