Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.

All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.