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.

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

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

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

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

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

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.