In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

What you fear most will happen to you - that is the law.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.