My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived..

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism..

My theory is - we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the….

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change..

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough..

Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition. The truth, Venus, is that nobody gets over anything..

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable.

Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture..

Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent..

Tremendous interest in the superficial is very characteristic of cultures in decline..

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.

I don't think I've ever been particularly scared of death - but scared of dying, the process. It doesn't seem to be a good way of doing it..

More will mean worse..

What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency….

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low i….

Every 10 years you're a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They're full of new rewards..

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands..

It used to be said that by a certain age a man had the face that he deserved. Nowadays, he has the face he can afford..

One of the unseen benefits of having children is that they deliver you from your own selfishness. There's no going back..

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart..

It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives ….