I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind. When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

If you want Allah to be persistent in granting you the thing you love, then be persistent in doing the things he loves.

When you translate the American writers who are best with dialogue into German - someone like Elmore Leonard, or Tom Wolfe, who's also quite good with dialogue. It's very hard to translate them well.

The public has become my fairy godmother.

Beautiful eyes in the face of a handsome woman are like eloquence to speech.

I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.

I generally don't enjoy relaxing and doing nothing on holiday.

People have the right to say what they want to.

Ruthless striving, overcomes everything.

I grew up in New York, so I grew up reading the Sunday Times. It's always something I've been aware of, since my childhood.