Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.

Literature is analysis after the event.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.