Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore..

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

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where….

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

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..

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 wit….

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..

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars..

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city..

I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read..

Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on..

To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A w….

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance..

People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work..

A whole generation of writers dined out on the dialectic between original cultures and their culture by "progress..

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle..

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other..

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 le….

The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an a….

There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form..

For years they have been using the role of 'sex object' as a cover while they spied out the land..