There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

Making love, we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

Leisure was the sine qua non of the full Renaissance. The feudal nobility, having lost its martial function, sought diversion all over Europe in cultivated pastimes: sonneteering, the lute, games and acrostics, travel, gentlemanly studies and sports, hunting and hawking, treated as arts.

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.

A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.