The women were responsible for everything. They were guilty of crimes, real and illusory. They had not thought hard enough, tried hard enough, asked enough of themselves. It was as if the plane had fallen from the sky for the sole reason that they had stopped flapping their arms.

People don’t realize you can’t copyright a plot,” Alessandro said finally. “You can’t even copyright a title, and that would be a lot easier to make an argument about.

You’re only as successful as the last book you published, and you’re only as good as the next book you’re writing. So shut up and write.

And one day she said to me, ‘For the rest of my life, it’s the first thing they’ll say about me when I leave the room.’ And I remember thinking: Yes that’s true, it will be. But we can’t really do anything about what they say when we leave the room. We’ll never be able to control that. And we shouldn’t try. Our job is just to... well, be in the room while we’re there, and try not to think too much about where we’re not. Whatever room we happen to be in, just, be there.

It was all he could do not to laugh, the lives of the vast majority of authors being far more private than they likely wished. Maybe Stephen King or John Grisham got approached in the supermarket by a quavering person extending pen and paper, but for most writers, even reliably published and actually self-supporting writers, the privacy was thunderous.

If a woman chose the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. The most capable therapist in the world wouldn’t be able to do much more than negotiate the treaty.

Pick the wrong person and it doesn’t matter how much you want to fix your marriage. It won’t work.

A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference.

The first time I went to Helene Hanff's apartment at 305 East 72nd Street, it was 1977, and I was a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be a writer.

A good story, a story resonant and remarkable, can be remade endlessly to tell new sides of itself for new generations of readers.