one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

A dog is the only exercise machine you cannot decide to skip when you don't feel like it.

We cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.