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.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

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.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

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