To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

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

There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.

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

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety.