Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.