Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

...life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.

WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.