Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.

A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

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

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.