Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

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.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.