The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.