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

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

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

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 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.

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