“Look, writers aren't perfect, 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.”

“It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.”

“For some people, the time differentials established in youth never really disappear: the elder remains the elder, even when both are dribbling greybeards. For some people, a gap of, say, five months means that one will perversely always think of himself--herself--as wiser and more knowledgeable than the other, whatever the evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps I should say because of the evidence to the contrary. Because it is perfectly clear to any objective observer that the balance has shifted to the marginally younger person, the other one maintains the assumption of superiority all the more rigorously. All the more neurotically.”

“Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.”

“It was perfectly possible to be an artist, yet also to be robust and responsible.”

“If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.”

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”