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[...] We’d often invite guests for dinner. They’d drink to our happiness, praise our lovely home: me, the young mother, the beautiful baby, and our perfect lives. What were they thinking when they left? The foolish ones were jealous, but those who were wise and sensitive must have breathed a sigh o…

I didn’t understand it then. He never wrote, never painted, never played any musical instrument. He despised “art lovers.” But he did read a lot, “systematically”—his favorite word—a little too systematically for my taste. I read passionately, according to mood. He read as though he were carrying o…

Sanity in a writer is merely this: However stupid he may be in his private life, he never cheats in writing. He never forgets that his audience is, at least ideally, as noble, generous, and tolerant as he is himself (or more so), and never forgets that he is writing about people, so that to turn ch…