Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.

The last sentence of a book is, of course, where you have to stop.

I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.

Most men experience getting older with regret, apprehension. But most women experience it even more painfully: with shame. Aging is a man's destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny . . . it is also her vulnerability.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.