Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

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.

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

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.