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.

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 epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

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

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.