He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

Plot a murder, you're saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.

No sense of the irony of human experience, that we are the highest form of life on earth, and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.