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

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance.

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

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.

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.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land.