There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

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

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

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.

Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.

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

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.