It’s clear that politeness to one’s elders can’t always be justified on the basis of the elder’s superior wisdom. It’s just that it’s not attractive to see a young person answering an older person back.

It’s hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.

I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

I’m a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination – an inability to tolerate mistery.

It’s always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn’t bad. It’s a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It’s just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that’s inside.

It’s similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you’d kill it...

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi – such an abherration in their workaday mendacity – that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on.

Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.

I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.