A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.