no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.

Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.