You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

Tennis: the most perfect combination of athleticism, artistry, power, style, and wit. A beautiful game, but one so remorselessly travestied by the passage of time.

Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.