There are few things more subtly distressing than an inappropriate gift from someone close to you.

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one.

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.

We cannot know the future. All we can do is face it bravely. We should take heed of those we love and respect. But in the end, we make every decision alone.

I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.

...There is a duty of solidarity among all us impossible, near-invisible people: a duty, out of sheer cussedness, not to disappear completely, simply to ease the conscience of the rest.

What people resist the most about spiritual healing is changing their minds.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

The tongue is very powerful, so what you say really is, and I really believe that. So I just try to say good things, and then things like this happen.

But she never just accepted me for the way I was.

The best way to live a miserable life is to pay attention to what other people are saying about you.

People in their early 20s are invariably weird.