If I was an aspirant litterateur, I was also an aspirant anarchist. I have disliked Authority always, though sometimes seduced by its resplendence.

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.

To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.

The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded

Insanity is hereditary - you can get it from your children.

I am a better person when I let myself have the time for romance and for love.

Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.

Profound things are simple. If it is not simple, it cannot be true. But simple things are difficult.

Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.

A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

Your quarrel is with God. I merely wish to offer Him the opportunity to judge you.

The books housed in one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become

Freedom is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.