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..

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..

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

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..

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..

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

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular..

The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or "reads" for them..

I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock..

Ruefulness is one of the classical tones of American fiction. It fosters a native, deglamorized form of anxiety..

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

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

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..

In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. They’re elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinariness…It’s not so much to ask, I sai….