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.

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

People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.

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.

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.

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

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.