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.

In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.

[On STDs] This be Nature’s way of recommending monogamy.

Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

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