Search Quotes

"Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying."

"Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries g..."

"The vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, ..."

"Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the car..."

"My second ex-wife was really kind of like a ship passing in the night. Only she turned out to be the Exxon Valdez."