Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.