History is the lies of the victors.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.

The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.

Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.

Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.