Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man; teetering on the roadside . . .

America has had much more respect for its writers because they had to define what America was. America wasn't sure what it was.

Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.

Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it's a funny thing, but I'm an exception to that rule.

I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.