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.

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

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

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.

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

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