Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

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

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him - for his body - any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him.

The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious--that is, a disease not understood--in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.