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

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.

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.

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

...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.