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

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.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.

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

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

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

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