Family life is by its nature cocooned, and expatriate family life doubly so. We had many friends and a few intimate ones, but it is in the nature of family rhythm—up too early, asleep too soon—to plac...
_Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds. /275
Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having fou...
Writers are married to their keyboards, as to their passports.
What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too.
We pursued the muses, instead of the mirrors.
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn’t.
The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small—to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways—to...
There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time,...
The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up.
Parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass.
Feeling for normal frailty and for mercy before justice and humanity before dogma,
The real crisis in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an...
After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.
A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, o...
We don't know that we've lost half a minute from our lives but we feel it somehow, we feel its absence. Something is missing, we think. And so we long for the thing we've missed and can't name, and ou...