Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

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.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.