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.

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

The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.

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

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.

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.

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.