Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.Gossip briefly wondered if gossip had invented the whole story, but gossip decided that the worst interpretation of events was usually the safest an...
Margaret used to say that there were two kinds of women: those with clear edges to them, and those who implied mystery.
Look, writers aren't , I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is, If they seem so, they can't be.
Khrennikov had an average ear for music, but perfect pitch when it came to power.
It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.
It took a while, but I remember the moment – or rather, the suddenly arriving argument – which made it less likely that I would kill myself. I realised that, insofar as she was alive at all, she was a...
It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.
It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handboo...
Istorija yra nugalėtojų melas, tik reikia pridurti, jog tai ir nugalėtųjų saviapgaulė.
Isn’t there something between stagnation and heading somewhere? Like? Like having a nice time. Enjoy the day and all that?
In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.
If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the k...
If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead...
I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
I'd read somewhere that if you want to make people pay attention to what you're saying, you don't raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention.
I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.
I survived. ‘He survived to tell the tale’ – that’s what people say, don’t they? History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories o...
I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant.