All schoolchildren are hostages to red tape and fiscal insufficiency.

The pity of living only once is that there is no way, ever, to be sure which sorrows are inevitable.

They are the kind of people who are embarrassed by money, a dead middle-class giveaway. Poor people are not embarrassed by money and are contemptuous of those who are.

[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time.

Many of us write because we are readers and have grown up in a long tradition, and we want to be able to add to that extraordinary flow of interpretations of the world.

When it comes time to do your own life, you either perpetuate your childhood or you stand on it and finally kick it out from under.

One of the marvels of personality is its resistance to prediction. One man's paralyzing trauma is another man's invitation to take control of his life; one woman's grounds for insanity is another woman's ground to a dramatic shaping of self.