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

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

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

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

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

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.

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