A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth.

If we break someone’s ego, then we can’t be happy. Egoism is his life!

Each day hands me a clean sheet of paper upon which to write. Therefore, I would be wise to write without ever having the need to erase.

What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin.

I can, therefore I am.

I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right.

People only mention it's a free country if they're doing something shitty.

I love figure skating and what I am able to express creatively. I want to leave a legacy in the sport.

Once I get out onstage, it's the same sort of basic production that it is anywhere else. But I might be a little bit aware that there might be people I know out there, who wondered where I was.

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.