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.

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

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

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.

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

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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