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

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.

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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

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

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