One reason writers write is out of revenge.

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

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.

History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

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.

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.