In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

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

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.

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

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.

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.

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