Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honor a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.

And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.

It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.