Each couple is its own vaudeville act.

The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It's not a selling point, it's not a 'quirky' feature, it's not a cynical marketing ploy, it's not an artistic statement, it's not even a plot device. It's a fact, like seedless grapes.

This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

It's gotten to a point where everybody is concerned about their rights and nobody is concerned about their duties.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.