"This was the book that made my John Updike collection pretty much superfluous. In one big, sprawling, ambitious novel, DeLillo captures the soul of white America at its most optimistic, soaring and sad — an amazing achievement. You can read this and look at what the country is now and cry tears."

"Sparer, more savage and so much more poignant than “Pride and Prejudice,” (a great book, too, and I don’t mean to disparage it at all,) “Persuasion” is a novel that tells us, as only Jane Austen can, about the vanities and follies of being human with such memorably dry wit."

"She accomplishes in this novel what I’m always trying to do in film: make the mundane extraordinary not by adorning it but by telling it as it is. It combines deadpan humor with romantic yearning and makes you want to read more novels and maybe also try to learn Russian."

"This was the first book to give me a thrill, the first to make me feel as if I was doing more than merely eavesdropping on grown folks’ business — I was one of the girls. At 12, I loved this novel so much that I never returned it to the library."

"The best novel, surely, of a writer we love because he makes us question our favorite beliefs. His Aziz, Fielding, Adela, and the Anglo-Indian lot are the superb metaphors in the moral drama as well as people I seem to remember as if I had known and interacted with them."