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 don't simply read books. We become them.

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

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

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.

Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore.

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