I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity.

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.

When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death