Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

As for my father, few souls are less troubled. He can be simply pleased with us, pleased that we exist, and, from the vantage point of his wondrously serene old age, he contemplates our lives almost as if they were books he can dip into whenever he wants. His back pages, perhaps.