I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.

Time heals all things but one: Time.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.