If you had an essentially happy childhood, that tends to dwell with you.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again.

At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

If you live in the same small place long enough, something you don't like is bound to happen

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.