I am beginning to understand the true difference between youth and age. Young people have time to make plans and think of new ideas. Older people need their whole energy to keep up with what’s already been set in motion.

You grow weary of being treated as the enemy simply because you are not young anymore; because you dress unexceptionally.

As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.

Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.