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

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

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

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

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.