Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

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

As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page