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.

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

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

The happy ending is our national belief.

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

We are a nation of 20 million bathrooms, with a humanist in every tub.

Others are to us like the characters in fiction, eternal and incorrigible; the surprises they give us turn out in the end to have been predictable and unexpected variations on the theme of being themselves.